


Alara's Inktober 2019 Ficlets

by Alara J Rogers (AlaraJRogers), AlaraJRogers



Category: Original Work, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Inktober 2019, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2020-11-28 09:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 46,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20964596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlaraJRogers/pseuds/Alara%20J%20Rogers, https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlaraJRogers/pseuds/AlaraJRogers
Summary: Doing the Inktober challenge, as stories, because I can't draw. Assorted ficlets. Most will be original, and if any are fanfics they will probably be relatively obscure fandoms.





	1. 1. Ring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original fiction. When I was 16, I wrote a short horror story about a nerdy loser (today we'd call him an "incel" type) who sells his body and life force to a mage who is kind of a psychic/energy vampire in order to be attractive to girls. Then I wrote a story set in the same universe from the perspective of the energy vampire mages, based on the Police song "Wrapped Around Your Finger", about a young man who is apprentice to a much older mage who he used to have a sexual relationship with before he found out she was 500 years old. That much older mage is the main character here. Eventually these mages, who I called "arcana", will get their own book or something.

"No," Diana Faust said, facing the Council. "No, I will not be bound to a ring. My teacher is dead; by the laws of the arcana, I am free, and I will so stay."

"See thou reason, woman," Fa Guang said impatiently. "Thou'rt a journeyman and young for it besides, still in the fullness of your first life—"

"I have taken more than one _client prime_," Diana said. "'Tis far from my first life."

"In body, yes," Amyntas said patiently. "In years, thou'd hardly be old enough to have children grown—"

"I have no children."

"And if thou hadst them, they'd still be in their youth. Thou wert an apprentice for less than ten years."

"Despite which, I avenged my teacher and earned the rank of Journeywoman."

"See _reason!_" Fa Guang shouted. "One as young as thou art should not be unbound! Accept the ring, take a new teacher. Amyntas has offered to take you, as have Nikolaus and Ismail both."

"Master Nikolaus was an apprentice for _six_ years, and was accorded the rank of master within forty. He is hardly a century old. Wherefore should the rules be different for me?" Diana smiled coldly. She knew well exactly why the rules were applied differently now.

"Let us be frank, then, if thou demandst it so," Gasparo said tightly. "Thou'rt a _woman_. Petrius should never have taken thee as apprentice. We all know 'twas thy coin, and perhaps thy body, not thy aptitudes, that led him to pretend thou wert suited for the magical arts."

"So Huo Tian said, before I killed him." She let herself smirk. "No master was he, true, but a journeyman of over 200 years' standing, and if Petrius told me true, 'twas his temperament and not his skills that led you to deny him an apprentice of his own. He was skilled enough to kill Petrius, who _you_ made a master when he requested permission to take an apprentice." He hadn't told them the apprentice he planned to take was a widow in her 30's. They were probably regretting that they hadn't pressed him for more information before granting his elevation. "And yet he fell to me, mere woman that you call me. Did you think such was blind chance?"

"Yes," Gasparo snapped. "He underestimated thee. Had he taken the combat seriously, thou'dst never have prevailed."

Probably true. But irrelevant. "The fact remains, I have earned my passage. I was the apprentice of a duly recognized master. I wore his ring. And when he was untimely and viciously murdered, I completed my obligation and avenged him. I have won a death-duel against another _arcana_ of more than twice my age and experience. By all of our laws I am a Journeywoman now, and with my teacher dead, I need not wear anyone's ring."

William scowled at her. "By all rights, we should try thee and banish thee from our company for causing Petrius' death. Huo Tian would never have killed a master with a _proper_ apprentice."

Fury welled. Diana controlled it. "What fault is that of mine? I did not choose to be born a woman. Petrius made the decision to teach me. Huo Tian decided to behave as if I were no _arcana_ at all, and he died for that presumption." She held William's eyes for a moment, then met Gasparo's. "He respected me not, and for that died. Petrius held me in respect. None of you can say the same." Antonio, Petrius' own teacher, had shown her _some_, but he behaved toward her more as a nobleman toward a daughter-in-law than a Journeywoman in her own right. "As for who _does_ share blame... you, o eminent Council, allowed a _master_ to be murdered by a journeyman with a grudge, and did naught. You sat on your highly respectable rears while I risked my life. I was apprentice enough, _arcana_ enough, to carry out justice in your stead, but now you claim I must submit to another teacher, one who never chose me in the first place?" 

She folded her arms in front of her. "I say you all, _nay._ Nay, I shall not submit. Petrius looked at me and saw a potential _arcana_ and future equal. You look at me and see only a woman. And you fear me, because I have killed an _arcana_ far greater in experience than I am, because I used the magics of Chaos and survived it, and you know not what I might do in future. I am young and you do not know me; I am a woman, and you are as blind as most men, for all your power, and have made yourself willfully ignorant of women. You want to control me. You want one that you trust to hold my life force on a leash, to bind me to the ring so you can compel my obedience if I do not do as you expect. But since you hold me in contempt for the sex of my birth, none of the excellence I seek, none of the knowledge I crave, will be held in the compass of what you expect. I shall not be bound by your expectations."

"We asked this of thee to give thee the right to obey of thy own will," Fa Guang said. "But do not think we cannot force thee. Choose a new master of your own accord, or be bound to our choice for thee."

She was fairly certain that that was a bluff. All _arcana_ magic was based around consent. Consent could be tricked, it could be uninformed, but the magic would simply not work in the face of a "no." However, she would take no chances with her freedom. "Then know this," she said. "I will die ere I submit to _any_ master. I am a Journeywoman and have earned that rank... by _killing an arcana_, and not one of little repute, either." She looked around the council chamber. "There are five of you, masters, and one of me, but I am prepared to die, hot in the flush of the youth you accuse me of. You men are wise elders of great age and experience... but can you guarantee that you could defeat me and _none_ of you suffer fatal consequence?" Diana smirked. "I think men of age and wisdom do not achieve such status by being careless with their lives, but how should I, a woman and young as you say, know what men of such age might think and do?"

She saw it sink in, saw them glance at each other. Yes. Men of great age, who might live a thousand years or more if they didn't fall in battle, would not be eager to go into battle against a young mage who'd expressed willingness to die before surrender and who'd already killed a powerful _arcana._

But they might imagine that she had too little power to prevail against even one of them, not after she'd consumed the life force of two entire _clients prime_ to wield enough power that she could avenge her teacher, not after the medics had had to give her _flos corde_ to save her life. So she let power out as light, letting a corona shine around her body like the halo of an angel. She saw their faces change, and knew they were thinking what she meant them to. _Arcana_ were careful with their power, because their power was life force, and could only be extracted from human beings who consented to give it. Most, the clients, gave small amounts, amounts they could spare, for minor acts of magic. _Let me become pregnant, make my husband love me again, protect my family while I'm soldiering for the Duke._ But the greatest amount of their power came from the _clients prime_, the people willing to give up their very lives in exchange for some great working of magic. And it wasn't particularly easy to find people who wanted something badly enough they were willing to die for it.

Diana had found _two_, within a year. And for all the Council knew, she could have managed the same trick. Two _clients prime_ had made her, briefly, so powerful she could barely restrain her power... but could she have learned better control? Could she have taken another _client prime_... or _two?_ How much power did she have?

And how willingly would any of them risk his own life to test her?

They looked to each other, and nodded, and drew back in their chairs, sitting back rather than up near the edges as they had been, and the master who hadn't spoken finally did.

Raoul held Diana's gaze. "Very well, Journeywoman. You have earned the position. It was not by your doing that you were unbound; that was Huo Tian, and you repaid him in accordance with the law and tradition."

Diana nodded, acknowledging his words, which were no more than her due, and the polite regard he showed her in saying "you" rather than "thou". But he went on.

"However. Do you not take up the ring as apprentice now, you shall never take up the ring as master. No matter how long you live or how learned you become, you will never teach an apprentice. You will never be granted the Master rank."

Diana had expected that. She breathed out. It wasn't a small matter, to be denied the right to have an apprentice, but she hadn't become an _arcana_ for power – neither the social power inherent in being known as a master, nor the physical power of life-force that the teacher could drain from the student through the rings they both wore. She wanted knowledge. And teaching a student would gain her no new knowledge for herself.

"I accept those terms, Council Elder," she said. 

"Then go from here. We have no further business with you."

It was a rude dismissal, but Diana had no desire to remain anyway. She bowed once, turned on her heel, and left the Council chambers, free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Conjugating "thou" and remembering where to use it is *hard!* Don't try this at home unless you've studied how to do it, folks. Here's my take on where to use it: if you've taken French, Spanish or German, "thou" was English's "tu/du", used informally or to social "inferiors", and only singular; English "you" started as the equivalent of French "vous", which is both the plural and the polite form. So "thou" would have been used to close friends, family members of lower status, perhaps family members of higher status depending on the family, servants, students, etc, and only one at a time; "you" was for anyone you have to suck up to, anyone with power over you, and also plural.


	2. 2. Mindless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original fiction based on the idea "zombie humans spread spam".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite the summary, this is not a "zombie horror" story and nobody dies or gets bitten by anything.

The patient was sitting on the table, dressed in a hospital gown, looking deeply irritated. "I don't even know why I'm here. I wanted to go to Five Guys," he said. "Why didn't you take me to Five Guys?"

The woman with him – close to the same age, late 20's or early 30's – sighed. She sounded exasperated. "Greg, we have _talked_ about this. You're here because—"

"You know, there's a great sale on fishing gear at Walmart. I could be at Walmart right now buying fishing gear."

"You don't even fish!"

"Hello," I said. "I'm Dr. Park. What brings you here today?"

"Nothing!" Greg Landers, my patient, said. He was a white guy with brown hair and stubble on his face, medium build, and looked overall reasonably healthy. "I'm fine! I just want to go to Five Guys. Or you know, Charles Schwab is a great place to open up your 401K. They've got a satisfaction guarantee. You won't see that at every investment firm!"

"He's been like this for days," the woman with him said. "He won't go to work, he won't do chores around the house... he eats, but he spends the whole time complaining that it's not some restaurant he wants to go to. Mostly Five Guys. Greg doesn't even like burgers that much."

"I don't think we've been introduced, Ms.--?"

"Oh, I'm Nicole Landers. I'm Greg's wife." I'd figured it was something like that.

"So tell me about Greg's online activities. Do you know what he's been doing lately?"

"Playing _Hell War!_" Greg said eagerly. "It doesn't cost any money to play! I want to know if I have what it takes to beat the Lords of Hell!"

Nicole sighed again. "Two weeks ago you were telling me that _Hell War_ was a cheap cash grab and that it's impossible to win without spending your entire paycheck on in-app purchases. Also you've never liked mobile games."

"Has he played any VR games recently?"

"Are we _done_ here? I am _really_ jonesing for some Five Guys. And then we can go over to Walmart!"

"Oh, yeah," Nicole said. "We both play _Fimbulwinter_ – that's a survival game about a post-apocalyptic world plunged into eternal winter – and _La Vie en Verte_, that's virtual gardening. He also plays _Beyond the Blue Event Horizon_, that's a space game, but I'm not into that so much."

Time to be politic. "Do you think he might ever have played a... well, a porn sim? Or been on a site for pirating games?"

"You know, I think I want my next car to be a Hyundai Annunciator. Those cars are _slick._ And they handle like anything, even in bad weather! And the mileage before recharge, wow. Amazing batteries on those guys!"

To my surprise, Nicole laughed. "Oh, yeah, Greg does porn sims. He's bi and genderfluid, so he likes to go online in a female avatar and have sex with dudes. Not really my thing, but he lets me watch if I want." My shock must have shown on my face. "What? It's the 21st century, you think I'm one of those women who clutches pearls and has the vapors if my husband plays porn games? I can't be a man for him and I'm too straight to want him when he's wearing femmy clothes, but the porn sim can give him those things without him exposing himself to diseases or other risks by going with real people."

While Nicole was explaining this, Greg told us what upcoming movies he thought were going to be "really awesome", repeated his request for Five Guys, tried to explain the plot of _Hell War_ in five-word sentences that were plainly marketing material, and talked about the lawnmower he wanted. Nicole rolled her eyes as he finished. "Greg, we live in an apartment. We don't even _have_ a lawn!"

"We could go to Century 21 and shop for a house! I know their agents will put us first."

"And why would we want to do that?"

"So we can have a lawn! The Home Depot sells the best grass seed—"

He went on like this, but I stopped listening. "I don't need to check anything else, Nicole. I'm sorry. Your husband's become a zombie."

"A _what_?" Nicole looked horrified. Belatedly I realized that just because she played VR games and was open-minded about her husband's porn habit didn't mean she was IT-savvy enough to know what I was talking about.

"Sorry, that's not the medical term for them. He's still alive, and physically he's fine. But mentally, his consciousness isn't operating his body. His brain's been hijacked by an information virus."

"An information virus? And what's that got to do with zombies?"

"An information virus is like a computer virus for people. And we call people infected with this type 'zombies' because they're not actually conscious."

Nicole looked at Greg, who was animatedly explaining why TGIFriday was the best sit-down restaurant, ever, but Five Guys was in a league of its own. "He looks pretty conscious to me."

"Ask yourself, Nicole, when Greg is normally conscious, does he spend his entire time sounding like a series of poorly mastered YouTube commercials?"

"No, that's why I _brought_ him here!"

"Right. The human brain can do an amazing lot of stuff without being conscious of it. You ever set out to drive a certain way, but part of it goes the way you usually do to a different destination, and you find that without paying attention you've somehow managed to drive halfway to the place you usually go rather than the place you're trying to get to?"

"I hardly ever drive. We have self-driving cars."

I controlled the impulse to sigh. That one was the best explanation. "Ok, well, if you think about how you type on a keyboard – when you start, you're awkward and you're hunting and pecking. But it gets to the level of muscle memory and you can just _do_ it, without having to consciously think about it. Or mastering the controls for a new game."

"Yeah, I guess..."

"I wanna go home and watch _CSI: Racial Justice Unit_! That is the _best_ show on television today. You know it won an Emmy last year, right?"

"Greg's brain has been hijacked by an information virus that compels him to advertise for maybe up to 40 different brands that he's aware of. He probably caught the virus on a porn site; that or an illegal pirated game site, those are usually the biggest vectors. Some of those brands might be aware that the advertisers they're working with are engaged in really shady practices like this, but most think they're paying for 'brand ambassadors' who've voluntarily chosen to talk up the brand to their family and friends. The virus lets him do anything you can do without being conscious, and it turns out, that's a lot more than people think it is. But right now he has no sense of rational judgement, his normal levels of compassion and empathy are almost entirely turned off, and he has no awareness that everything he says is an advertisement."

"So – what can we do? Is it curable? Is he suffering? Oh, God, is he trapped inside his own mind while his body is running around spouting ads?"

"No. The real Greg, his actual consciousness, isn't awake – that's kind of what happens when people aren't conscious. And yes, it's very curable. I'm going to have him sit in this booth with a VR headset on and watch a detoxification protocol, and that should do the trick."

"It won't hurt him, will it?"

"No, not at all. It just nullifies the virus and wakes him up."

"Ok. Let's do that then."

"Mr. Landers!" I interrupted his monologue about the Hyundai Annunciator. "Can you sit in this chair and put on this headset, please?"

"But I'm really hungry. I want Five Guys."

"I think Nicole would be happy to take you to Five Guys after you watch this short VRdeo. Isn't that right, Nicole?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure." From her expression I could tell she would rather swallow a live earthworm, but anything to get him to sit down and watch.

"Well, okay. Long as I can have Five Guys after." Greg sat down in the chair, I put the headset on him, and for ten minutes, that was that. I talked to Nicole about the importance of strong antivirals on the VR headset, not just relying on your network firewall, and maybe running a quick one-minute detox scan after ending a game.

The timer beeped, and I removed Greg's headset. "How do you feel, Greg?" I asked.

"Okay, I guess, but I still want to go get Five Guys. Hey, Nickie, you promised, can we leave now?"

My eyebrows went up. "That's... unusual."

"It didn't work?" Nicole was clearly on the verge of a panic attack.

"It didn't, but calm down. This just means I have to go to the next level and do a manual treatment. That's going to take a while, but I'm _really_ curious as to how this particular bug survived the detox, so I tell you what; if you can wait, I have, I think, three more patients on the schedule for today, and then we can do Greg's treatment." Normally I'd ask them to make a second appointment for a thing like this, but my detox VRdeo was brand new, just updated yesterday. I wanted to see what kind of bug could get through a brand new scan, and I didn't want to wait until next week or whenever my calendar was clear enough for a half hour session.

"I... guess we can wait..."

"Well, if we're not doing anything, then how about we go to Five Guys?"

"Just take him," I said. "It might shut him up for a little while, and it's not likely to do him any harm."

"But Greg doesn't even like burgers."

"Greg Landers the human man with a unique intelligence and personality doesn't like burgers. Greg the Zombie, the cookie-cutter advertising goon, does. Unless he's got allergies or sensitivities and can't eat burgers—"

"No, he just doesn't like them." Nicole looked at her feet. "I... _guess_ I could take him. When do we have to be back?"

I gave her my best estimate of how long it was going to take to get through the last three patients, and then as I walked them to the door I let the receptionist know to expect them back.

* * *

Once they were back, I sat Greg down with an interactive VRdeo that I'd be running with him, and then sat down and put on my own headset.

The information viruses work by directly injecting "code" from the brain's "operating system" through either the optic or auditory channels, or both, but you don't perceive them as code. You perceive them as something else. I don't know what Greg saw – for everyone it's different – but for me, it was very brief flashes of something I could barely see, something dark and full of wrongness, accompanied by a very brief flash of panic and horror. My brain _knows_ when something's trying to invade it from the outside. But my headset had the newest antivirals on it and the best, most sophisticated dedicated firewall, so for me the code injection attempts were just that, attempts. 

The VRdeo that was running was highly interactive, keyed to produce full sensorium response – a perfect breeding ground for a zombie virus. Greg's viruses couldn't resist the opportunity to replicate and invade someone else. But that was not happening today. As the viruses struck out at me, my security grappled with them, analyzed them, and fed me images that in turn I could feed back to Greg that would neutralize that particular virus. 

When we were finished, I once again asked him, "How do you feel, Greg?"

He was looking around in bewilderment. "This... is a _doctor's_ office? How the hell did I even get here? Did I pass out or something, Nickie?"

"Oh, thank God!" Nicole said.

"Looks like that did the trick," I said. "Make sure you run antivirals, like I said. Good ones, don't skimp on the cost. If you've got the money to game, you've got the money to protect yourself while gaming."

"Thank you, Doctor, you're a wonder—"

"What the hell is going on? What was _wrong_ with me?"

I let Nicole explain to her husband as they walked out the door, and I locked up for the night. It'd been a long day, and I was hungry. I could really go for some Five Guys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this was weaker than it could have been... the whole "fighting the virus" bit seems really anticlimactic, but with some expansion, I feel like this one could be a complete short story.


	3. 3. Bait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original fiction. A problematic sleepover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: attempted child molestation and implication that it went further than an "attempt" on other children in the past.

Minna was very, very reluctant to let Jasmine come to her house for a sleepover; Jasmine had to work on her for most of the school year, despite Minna coming over Jasmine's house over a dozen times. But finally, in May, Minna agreed. "My dad's going to be out of town," she said, "so you can come over this weekend."

"I don't understand why I can't come over when your dad's around?"

"Uh, my dad likes peace and quiet, that's all."

On the night of the sleepover, however, it turned out Minna's dad was in town after all, his business trip apparently unexpectedly canceled while Minna was at school. "Oh," Minna said. "We ought to cancel this, then. Maybe you should call your parents?"

"Don't be silly!" Minna's mom said. "It'll be fine, won't it, Jake?"

"That's right. I've got no problem with you having a sleepover, sweetie. Who's your little friend there, honey?"

"I'm Jasmine." He didn't _seem_ like he was angry, or mean.

"Jasmine?" He laughed. "Is that old-lady name making a comeback now?"

"I was named after my grandma. My friends call me Jazz, though."

"That's great," Jake said, grinning. "You like board games, Jazz? You even heard of board games? I know you kids, always playing on your VR sets, but did you ever play real games like we used to when we were kids?"

Jasmine happened to know that if Jake was the age he appeared to be, his childhood was probably spent playing video games on 2 dimensional screens, but she didn't challenge him. "I like board games, sure!"

Minna looked unhappy, but she didn't say anything. Minna's mom wanted to join in, so they all played Monopoly. And when it was over and Jake had won, Minna suggested playing Risk. "You like Risk, right, daddy? I bet Jazz would like Risk..."

"Too late in the evening, honeybuns," Jake said, ruffling Minna's hair as she flinched. "You girls need to get some sleep! I've got the guest room all made up for Minna."

"But daddy! It's a sleepover! She was going to sleep in my room!"

"Don't be silly," Jake said. "You girls would be up all night talking then, and ruin yourselves for school the day after tomorrow!"

Nightgowns were put on. Teeth were brushed. Jake hovered, making sure they went through their bedtime routines. Jasmine could see why Minna wouldn't want her over for a sleepover if this was the way her dad acted. It wasn't that he didn't like Minna having friends, it was that he was obsessively attentive, to the point where it was hard to actually just find time to hang out by themselves and play. Maybe that was why Minna had suggested playing Risk; playing with her friend and her dad wasn't as good as playing with her friend, but it was better than being sent to bed separately.

When lights went out, Jasmine took her nightly meds with the glass of water she'd cajoled from her friend's parents for her bedside nightstand, and then lay in bed on her side looking out the window. Half an hour later, she heard the door open, and rolled over. "Mr. Levesque?"

"Oh, you can call me Jake, Jazz," Minna's dad said. "Mind if I come in?"

"Well, I was trying to sleep..."

"Oh, that's okay. You're young, you can deal with a little lost sleep. You just have to count them up when you find it." He chuckled. "You get it? Because 'little lost sheep', and you're supposed to count sheep to fall asleep. Do they tell you kids to do that nowadays? They told me."

"I know about it," Jazz said. 

Jake sat down on the edge of the bed. "You kids know all kinds of things nowadays, don't you? With all this stuff on the Internet nowadays."

"Didn't they have the internet when you were a kid?" The Internet had been around for over a century, but for some reason, adults seemed to love behaving as if it was a brand new thing that only kids understood.

"Oh, yeah, but it wasn't the same. We didn't have VR, we didn't have olfactory or tactile back then." He leaned in. "I bet you spend a lot of time on the VR, right?"

"Um, I guess. I have a lot of homework most days, though."

"You ever watch any porn, Jazz?"

Jasmine sat up. "Uh, wow. That, uh. That's... not a question dads are supposed to ask sleepover friends of their daughters, is it?"

"It's fine," Jake said. "I know you modern kids are into all that kind of stuff."

"Um, not really."

"Oh, come on. I know all you girls nowadays watch that stuff. Not like when I was a kid. Back then, the boys were the only one who used to watch that stuff. But I know you kids nowadays don't think there's anything wrong with girls liking, you know. To do it."

"I don't think—"

"You ever thought about doing it with a boy?"

"I, uh—"

Jake leaned forward again. He was far enough into Jasmine's personal space that she would have difficulty getting out of the bed. "It's okay. I can teach you."

"I really don't want to—"

"You've got to learn sometime," he said, and kissed her. With tongue. Gross, disgusting, grownup tongue. 

Jasmine bit his tongue, hard, and as soon as he recoiled, she shoved the taser she'd been holding under the covers into his solar plexus. His face wasn't in contact with hers anymore, so she was free to pull the trigger, and she did.

"You little—" Jake started to say, thickly, with his bitten tongue, and then he couldn't speak again because he was convulsing and falling off the bed.

Jasmine threw the covers back and pulled out the badge and the ID card she'd been keeping under the pillow. "Detective Jasmine Sykes, Sex Crimes division. Jake Levesque, you're under arrest for attempted solicitation of a minor, sexual assault—"

"You're – you're not a minor, bitch!" he gasped out. Good. So he knew what the color band around her ID meant.

"You're right. I'm 53 years old," she agreed. "But you thought I was a minor. And you did kiss me after I explicitly said I didn't want to, which is sexual assault. Given the reports we have on you from some of Minna's other friends, I think that's going to be enough." 

The door opened. "Jazz! Are you all right?" Minna asked, and then took in the taser, the ID with the colored hologrammatic border, the badge. "Oh."

"My backup's just pulled up outside, Minna. Can you get your mom to let them in?"

"I... okay..." She looked down at her father, and her face twisted. "Serves you right! I hope you go to jail, you creep!"

"Minna – honey –" He reached toward her, from where he was lying on the floor, but she turned and ran. 

"You have the right to remain silent," Jasmine said. "Anything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to a lawyer—"

Her partner, 6 foot two and solid muscle, came in, holding a real gun, with two other cops behind her. "Jazz! You okay? This scumbag didn't hurt you, did he?"

"Naah. He kissed me. It was horrible, I don't know what the fuck kind of aftershave he uses but he'd be better off moisturizing with a three day old dead rat. But I've dealt with worse, and that's as far as it got."

Jasmine let the grownup cops handle talking to Minna's mom, filling out the paperwork for the arrest, cuffing the perp and dragging him off to the van. She had a traumatized ten year old to deal with.

"I thought – I thought you were my friend," Minna said to her, eyes filled with tears.

"You are my friend."

"But you're a grownup! I saw your ID, I know you're a child impersonator!"

Jasmine sighed. She hated that name, but in her particular case she really couldn't dispute it. The Extended did not all have professions where they had to pretend to be children, but she did. "I'm not a grownup, I'm an adult. There's a difference. And if I don't have any friends who are actual kids, then I wouldn't be able to do my job. I like you, Minna. I liked playing with you."

"Did you just make friends with me to get at my dad?"

"I transferred to your school to get at your dad, but if you and I hadn't been friends I would have gotten him to show his true colors some other way." She took Minna's hand. "He did this to some of your other friends, too, didn't he?"

She choked on a sob. "He said – he said he'd never need to come to me again if I invited my friends over, but I didn't know what that meant. I tried sleepovers twice. The first time I didn't know. Kayde wouldn't be my friend anymore after that. The second time I heard him, with Myesha, I knew I couldn't ever have another sleepover. But you kept asking, and he was supposed to be out of town! You were supposed to be safe!"

"It's okay, Minna. I know you were trying to keep me safe. It's all right."

She hugged Minna, who sobbed again a couple of times before getting herself under control. "Is this – do you do this kind of thing a lot? Go over kids' houses and prove their dads are..."

"I don't always do it by making friends with the kids, no. Sometimes I take a class with the guys, or I get in their car, or something."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

Jasmine nodded. "But not as bad for me as for an actual kid. I've been doing this for 30 years."

Minna shook her head. "That's so weird. You look just like any of my classmates."

"Yeah, it is weird." Jasmine's parents had been rich enough to make her one of the Extended, over 40 years ago. Anybody could be immortal – well, unaging, at least – as long as they started the treatment before puberty. The same treatment that kept her cells dividing and her body from breaking down with age, kept her from ever going through puberty or reaching an adult's height. She was fortunate to be a cop – universal health care didn't cover the cost of Extension, but Extended were so useful in the police force, with their ability to catch pedophiles in sting operations, get information out of child witnesses, go unnoticed by criminals, and anything else an actual kid could do but wouldn't know how to, or couldn't be exposed to the risk of doing, that most big-city forces paid for the Extension medications for their Extended officers. As few as five missed treatments and puberty would start, and once it did, Jasmine would age and eventually die the same as any normal human. She could be immortal, as long as she gave up her right to ever look like an adult.

Extended – usually referred to as "child impersonators" in the media, and by average people – could theoretically live forever. The oldest of them were only in their 60's, but it was holding true so far. Enough people had made that bargain in their childhoods that Extended got specially marked IDs identifying them as Extended, granting them secure access to their full adult rights. No matter what age they looked, society had to acknowledge their true ages in any age-restricted activity. Such as drinking, or being cops. 

"You are my friend," Jasmine repeated. "I like making friends with kids. Adults don't get to play. Who'd want to give that up?"

"Are you gonna stay? At my school?"

She couldn't. She might find it very relaxing to impersonate a fourth grader, and she might enjoy having actual children for friends, but the department would want her to go somewhere else, especially now that her cover was blown here. "I'll stay as long as they let me," Jasmine said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "child impersonators" are an idea I got from the story "Child of All Ages" by P. J. Plauger, which is about the daughter of a BC-era alchemist whose father came up with a formula for immortality. The catch being, it doesn't work on adults, and as soon as a child enters puberty it ceases to work. So the daughter has been physically a "child" for millennia.
> 
> In my more science fiction-y take on it, the process was invented in the modern age, probably sometime in our near future. Children who take the immortality meds do not enter puberty and they do not age and they do not grow. They can quit at any time, at which point they will have a normal human lifespan from that point onward. No government with universal health care actually pays for the immortality meds, so they tend to enter professions where they either make a *lot* of money, or where their employers pay for their meds because their child-like appearance is part of their job.


	4. 4. Freeze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fanfic of Diane Duane's "Young Wizards/Feline Wizards" universe, but the characters are original. In the feline wizards series, we're told there are dog wizards, but I don't know as that we ever met any (it might have happened in the later books in the Young Wizards series, and if so, I apologize as I have probably stomped all over canon.) I'm not even much of a dog lover -- I prefer cats -- but it surprises me the extent to which science fiction wants to talk about cats rather than dogs, so I felt I needed to write about a dog wizard. And while the cat wizards work in cat teams, dogs aren't allowed by humans to wander around freely; a dog wizard gets more done, more easily, by teaming up with a human wizard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't much of a *story* per se; it presents a conflict and then never resolves it. It's a ficlet, setting up characters.

Faro padded gingerly out onto the ice. It held her weight at first, but six body-lengths and it was starting to creak dangerously. "This is bad, Ilya," she said. "It's taking my weight for the moment, but I feel like it could crack any minute." The ice was _supposed_ to be solid and firm out a mile or more from shore. 

"Be careful, Faro!" her partner, Ilya, shouted to her.

He was speaking his own language, which Faro referred to as _Ruhhyi_, and Faro was speaking her own – which Ilya's kind called Kyonsky, or Kyonish when he was speaking with the Americans they worked with sometimes, but Faro just referred to it as what it was – Pack-speech. She often felt that she was one of the luckiest _rawuu'uhff_, Pack-people, on the planet; most Pack-people couldn't make themselves understood to their _huun_ packmates, and had to study and work incredibly hard just to make sense of a handful of commands in _huun_-speech. But Faro and Ilya were both wizards, both capable of the Speech – the language of magic, of the universe's creation – and as such, could understand any other language spoken to them.

"I'm always careful!" Faro barked back. In her mind she assembled, and then whispered, a phrase to the ice, reminding it of when it had been solid and thick, easily able to hold a Pack-person's weight. The ice, so reminded, obliged her by bearing her out as far as it existed. She jumped from floe to floe, digging thick claws into the ice when she landed to avoid skidding, until the ice layer that floated atop the seawater was so thin, it might as well be water and she'd have needed an entirely different spell to be able to walk on it.

Less than a quarter mile. Faro turned around and bounded back. "We've lost 75% of the ice in this area," she whined to Ilya, tail between her legs and her head down, not as an expression of guilt or shame – the beings who'd wreaked this devastation were Ilya's species, not hers, and besides, Faro didn't believe in blaming people for something done by an entirely different pack – but intense sorrow. "We're going to see a species die-off that rivals the dinosaurs."

"That might be overstating it just a _little_ bit," Ilya said, but his smile was wan. He sat down on the ice – well, technically on his backpack, which he'd dropped onto the ice – and Faro trotted over to him, accepting the comfort of gloved _huun_ fingers rubbing her scruff through her thick fur. It was nicer when Ilya's fingernails weren't covered, but even if it had been unpleasant she'd have let Ilya do it, because _huun_ liked to pet Pack-people as much as Pack-people liked to be petted. "But you're right. Siberia, Norway, Alaska, now we've confirmed Canada is just as bad. I don't think we need to do a spot check in Greenland, do we?"

"It's the same sun and the same sky everywhere on Earth." Faro looked up at Ilya. "Are we going to intervene?"

"It's complicated."

"It's thousands of living things."

"Probably millions, actually, but—"

"And if you don't think we have enough power, I agree the working would be too much for the two of us, but we could recruit some assistance. I know a wizard wolf pack around here—"

"Really? Wolves get to be wizards too?"

Faro chuffed. "_All_ Pack-people are covered by the same Choice. We made it a long, long time ago, before even you _huun_ did. So yes, there are wolf wizards, and coyote wizards, and I even heard there's a dingo pack in Australia—"

"It's not about the power, Faro." Ilya stared at the ice below him, his scent profoundly sad. "My kind are the ones who're doing this."

"No one blames you for what the other _huun_ are doing, Ilya. They're not your pack."

"That's not my point." He stood up and flung his arms out. "This isn't being done by magic. We humans are doing this by _accident_, a side effect of technology we're refusing to give up."

"Yeah, the Packless One loves to trick life into destroying itself. It doesn't even need to resort to magic to do it. So what? We don't have to limit ourselves to interventions only when magic is involved, not on this scale. We're talking about an entire _biome_ potentially being destroyed." Faro ran a short distance, barked, ran another short distance and barked, then turned on her paws and raced back to Ilya – a gesture that a _huun_ could have accomplished with an outward swing of arms, a gesture that meant "all this territory is what I'm talking about." "We need to freeze it, Ilya! We need to save them! I admit that freezing the entire coastline around the Arctic Circle is a little much, but we could get a _lot_ of other wizards—"

"Faro! Just listen to me!"

Faro shut up.

"I know humans. If we freeze the Arctic with wizardry, we'll save an entire biome, right. For a _while_. But it's the fact that the ice is melting that's making my people finally realize how badly we're screwing up the planet. You know humans don't know about wizards, in general—"

"Yeah, I've never understood that. Why don't you just _tell_ the other humans?"

Ilya rolled his eyes. "For the same reason we're destroying the Arctic in the first place. Because there are a _lot_ of corrupt and idiotic humans who'd misuse the existence of wizardry the way we've misused everything else. My point is. If everything freezes back over, they won't know wizards did it. They'll think it's natural. And if it's natural, then the warming was natural too, because the scientists' predictions of the Arctic melting will be proven wrong. So all the people who are just now starting to think that _maybe_, possibly, they might have to change their lifestyles or do something inconvenient to protect the planet... they'll all think 'Oh, false alarm!' And nothing will change." He sat down on the knapsack again. "It's the entire planet warming, not just the Arctic. Wizardry can't fix that. Humans need to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere or the entire planet will keep heating up, and it's here in the Arctic that it's most obvious."

His logic made too much sense. Faro whined. "But isn't there _anything_ we can do?"

"We can do what we're been doing. We can track down enough animals and send them to the future that there'll be a breeding population even if they go extinct in the here and now. We can do small local fixes. We can identify anything that's so endangered it risks dying out right _now_ and transport its members further inland to save their lives immediately. But magic isn't what's destroying the Arctic, or the rest of the planet, and if we try to use wizardry to fix it, we'll be stuck using wizardry to fix it over and over again, because humans won't _learn._ We won't change unless we think we'll die if we don't."

Faro wanted to howl. The Great Pack Mother and Her Pups had granted her all of this power, power to change the lives of _huun_ and Pack-people alike, and she couldn't _use_ it to save the world. She couldn't use it to freeze her home back over and save the bears and the delicious fish and the _huun_ who needed to hunt those things to live. 

She managed to keep the howl back, but she whimpered, and couldn't stop whimpering, occasionally breaking into small yips of distress. Ilya ruffled her fur again. "I know. I know, girl," he said, his own voice rough with the effort of keeping back tears, smelling of despair and resignation. "Let's go back home. We're done here for the day. We can come back tomorrow and try to save some animals, but right now, you need a steak and I need a hot buttered rum and cherry vareniki."

"That sounds good," Faro choked out, getting her whimpers under control. "Maybe after we eat we'll think of something we can do."

"Maybe," Ilya said, but he didn't sound or smell like he believed it.


	5. 6. Husky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diane Duane Wizards fanfic. Another ficlet about Faro and Ilya.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the prompts are out of order; Husky was Day 6. I skipped Day 5 because Freeze and Husky, together, gave me the framework for creating Faro and Ilya and their backstory.

"Oh, she's gorgeous!" the American scientist said to Ilya. Faro, who could understand _huun_ speech and thus knew she was being complimented, wagged her tail fast enough that if she'd been more aerodynamic she could have propelled herself into flight with it. "What's her name?"

"Faro," Ilya said. "Thanks. She is beautiful." He scratched her on the scruff, deep within her thick fur. "And you know it, don't you girl?"

"I sure do," Faro barked back. The American woman didn't understand her, of course, because she was speaking Pack-speech, but Ilya understood her just fine.

"Faro? That's an Egyptian name. Kind of a strange choice for a female husky, isn't it?"

"It's not Egyptian. It's just her name. It means 'duck'. She likes to go in water much more than average dog, let alone husky, so we call her 'duck.'"

"What are you going to do if she asks you what language that's in?" Faro asked, amused, knowing Ilya couldn't answer her directly in front of a non-wizard human. He wasn't going to be able to tell her it was Kyonsky, the Russian word for the language of dogs, after all.

"Shush, you," Ilya said. "We get your treats soon enough."

"Hah! Duck! That's a cute name." The scientist smiled. "I'd ask to pet her, but she's a working dog, isn't she?"

"She is not service animal," Ilya said. "She is working dog, yes, but we work outside. Here in station, you can pet her."

"Oh!" The woman bent down and ran her fingers through Faro's fur. "You're such a pretty girl, aren't you? And you work so hard, yes you do. Ilya's a slave driver, isn't he?"

"No, Faro is workaholic," Ilya said, chuckling. "She makes _me_ get out of bed and go outside when I would rather sleep in."

Faro shivered with pleasure. The American's fingernails were just slightly longer than Ilya's, and the scritch she was delivering was _amazing._ It would be disloyal to tell Ilya how good it felt, but Faro didn't have any qualms about enjoying it.

"Well." The woman stood up. "I won't keep you any longer, Dr. Chernyshevsky. You give that good girl some treats, now."

"Yeah, Ilya. You heard the lady. Give me treats," Faro said.

"I will, Dr. Greenspring. See you later." He walked away with Faro's leash, and she followed. It was a _huun_ rule that the working dogs needed to be leashed in the station, even if they generally did their work off leash and were trained to commands. Faro found this mildly irritating, but she couldn't blame the _huun_; other Pack-people could be very badly behaved sometimes, and submitting to stupid _huun_ rules was a small price to be able to work with her beloved _huun_ partner.

Ilya and Faro weren't a master and a pet; they were equals, both wizards, both partners in the endless battle to preserve life against the machinations of the Packless One and his inventions, entropy and death. This was not something that could be explained to other _huun _unless they were also wizards, with the exception of Ilya's mother, who'd found out when he was on Ordeal as a teenager, first becoming a wizard. 

In the world of _huun,_ Ilya Chernyshevsky was a biologist with a specialization in the Arctic biome, and he was working with a team of other scientists to identify endangered species and tag members of the species. In that world, Faro was something like a servant, something like a biological tool, and only a tiny bit like a colleague; _huun_ thought themselves superior to Pack-people, and as long as _huun_ were masters of the hunt and brought the food home, Pack-people usually agreed and let them have their status. But in the world of wizardry, Ilya and Faro were a wizard partner-team who worked to protect the species of the Arctic from destruction by _huun_ industry or tourists or residences, and lately, the global warming caused by the _huun_. 

Once inside Ilya's office, Faro said a Word from the Speech, the language reality was built on, and the leash unhooked itself from her collar. "I think the research is really helping. You've got so much evidence to present to the other _huun._ When they put the TV on in the common room, I hear the _huun_ newspeople talking about the global warming all the time, and the research you and the other scientist teams are doing. Do you think it's doing any good?"

Ilya shrugged. "It's hard to say. The people who want to pretend it isn't happening and they can keep going like they always have are _very_ powerful, Faro. You know how pack likes to agree within pack? And pack likes to agree with pack leader?"

"Yes," Faro said. "And you said _huun_ society is made of packs of packs, right?"

"That's right," Ilya said. "Well, the powerful leaders who don't want anything to change have a _lot_ of human packs under their control, and most of those people don't want to disagree with the leaders they've chosen to follow any more than you dogs like to disagree with _your_ pack leaders." He sat down on the only chair that wasn't covered with piles of printouts. "But I think – I hope – it's helping."

"I hope so too," Faro said. "I know we can't risk fixing it with wizardry... but there's so many hungry animals out there. So many creatures driven out of their homes. The balance of _everything_ is in chaos. I don't know how long all the creatures up here can afford to wait for _huun_ to figure out what's at stake and change things."

"I know," Ilya said. "I know."


	6. 5. Build

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original fic. "The Bad News Bears", but in space, with aliens, who are engineers rather than baseball players.

The Diwar are famed throughout the galaxy (well, to be pedantic, the general area of the Local Arm) as engineers and inventors. They are well known for the quality of their work, their scientific advancements, and the skill with which they implement theory into practical reality. (Also, their great love of beer, which has led to an unlikely friendship between the Diwar and the newest species to develop spaceflight in the Local Arm, Humans.) Their interest in engineering and creation is so great that, where Humans, Kai, Luffen and other species celebrate competitions of physical skill, the Diwar's great planetary competition is The Great Build, an engineering competition.

Remember that the person at the bottom of the medical school graduating class is called "doctor", and you will have some idea what the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples are like. Every competition has a large number of teams involved, and _someone's_ got to be on the bottom.

The Hyperpurples are the team of Fillit Province, a northern, rather chilly and rocky demesne on the homeworld which is primarily known for fishing. Yes, this is not a bad Human speculative fiction where all the people of a planet have the same professions and behave the same way. Not all Humans work in the fiction industry, not all Kai are warriors, and not all Diwar are great engineers. The people of Fillit Province are proud of their Build team, though; despite the fact that the Hyperpurples have _literally_ come in last in the last four competitions, Fillito are loyal. After all, for a tiny fishing province without even a great university to be able to field a team at _all_, let alone one that even made it into The Great Build, is an amazing accomplishment. The accomplishment is not that the fisher-Diwar are _great_ engineers in comparison to the rest of their people, but that they are engineers at all.

The problem is that the competition keeps itself from getting stale by kicking out any team that is in the bottom 10th percentile for five competitions in a row. If the Hyperpurples don't perform better than at least ten percent of the other teams this year, they're dead in the water. Loyal followers in their hometowns will be deeply disappointed. (Diwar are known for their passion as much as for their love of engineering. Disappointing a Diwar usually results in unpleasant consequences, such as finding that your personal conveyance has been disassembled and its parts strewn about your property.) Family members will declaim at length about the tragedy... and how members of the team who scraped and saved to leave Fillito Province to get a good education at a decent engineering school should have stayed home and caught fish for a living. Funds that were flowing into the Hyperpurples' bank accounts from the sales of merchandise to their loyal fans will dry up.

"We could try to do something safe. Something respectable," Irta said, nervously pulling at the feathers along the shoulder of his large-arm. There weren't many left. Irta, like all of them, had been under a lot of stress lately. "Maybe a conveyance for a non-standard environment? Something that would work in, I don't know, 20 g?"

"Boring!" Bakoon declared, with a wide wave of his own large-arm and a fluff of his crest. "We need to capture the _imaginations_ of the public! To come in 11th percentile or higher, we can't do something mean and pedestrian; beyond a contest of engineering skill, this is a contest of _ideas!_"

"Besides, it's not as if we can win on our engineering skill," Rikwaal said sardonically, her small-arms busily occupied with inputting because Rikwaal liked to look as if she was so important to the team, her work never stopped. She was actually a project manager, so the truth was, without a project to engage in, she didn't have anything to do either.

"Speak for yourself," the team's other female, Enshru, snapped. "_You_ can't win on engineering skill because _you_ are not an engineer."

"Judging from our performance the last four years, neither are the rest of you," Rikwaal said.

"Guys, could we stop arguing? This isn't getting us any closer to the prize," Le'ir said. He was young, and very earnest, but well-respected for his comportment, his friendliness, his alcohol tolerance, and his ability to go for three days without sleep at crunch time and still have his work come out as competition-quality. "We need a really new idea. Something to shake things up."

"I agree!" Bakoon said. "_Regardless_ of our skill at engineering, one of our metrics is viewership. Get enough Diwar to follow us and it won't matter if we fail spectacularly and blow something up. We'd at _least_ come in higher than 11th percentile, if everyone following the competition followed _us_ as a focus-team." 

Enshru snorted. "It sounds like you think this competition is one of those Human things where the Humans with big muscles pretend to wrestle each other! This isn't about show business, it's about _making_ something that makes people take notice of us!"

"Which we have never accomplished before," Rikwaal said, "and therefore, it really seems implausible that we'd manage it _this_ time."

"I like the idea of making a conveyance," Irta complained. "We could make it a really sleek one. Give it some real power and maneuverability."

"We're not manufacturers of _conveyances_, dear boy," Bakoon said in the most patronizing tone imaginable. "We're manufacturers of _spectacle._ We're here to impress! To have audacious ideas that no Diwar has had before – or has succeeded at, or has done as well at – and then to _implement_ them in a tremendous way!" Every time he spoke with emphasis, Bakoon's crest fluffed. His large-arms gesticulated wildly as he strutted. "We need something _fantastic_, something _spectacular!_"

"So that, even if we fail miserably, everyone tunes in to watch us blow ourselves up?" Enshru said.

"Well, by _preference_ I would rather not explode, but yes, that's the idea."

"Can I make a suggestion?" Le'ir said. "This may sound like a stupid idea..."

"Oh, go ahead," Enshru said. "It can't be worse than Irta's conveyances."

"Hey!"

"I think we should bring in a Human."

Bakoon, who'd been dipping his beak-like snout into his wine glass, spat out everything that was in his mouth. "_What?_"

"You're right," Irta said. "That _does_ sound like a stupid idea."

"Hate to agree with Irta," Enshru said, "but when he's right..."

"Please share with me the name of your supplier," Bakoon said. "It's evident that your drugs are of the _highest_ quality."

Rikwaal cocked her head to the side. "Well, now. You wanted spectacle, and let's be honest; it's not as if adding a Human could make this team any _worse._"

"Hear me out," Le'ir said. "All sarcasm aside, we know our skills aren't up to 11th percentile; we've come in _last_ for four years."

"We did better five years ago," Enshru said.

"That was five years ago. Either the competitors are getting tougher or we're getting weaker. Not the point. Now, the metrics are based on three factors, right? The creativity of the idea, the skill of the implementation, and the degree to which the audience is following us specifically."

"Thank you for explaining things we all already know." Enshru lifted her head and tilted it sideways, her sharp eyes focusing on Le'ir. "I am sure none of us had any idea how this competition we've been performing in for nearly a decade now works."

Le'ir huffed. "Let me _talk_, Enshru." He glared back at her. She reached her left small-arm over to her left large-arm and began grooming the feathers there, backing down while pretending not to have lost face. "So. Skill of implementation's worth the most, obviously, and that's where we have our greatest weakness. But if we could do really well on the other two, we'd have a chance. And Humans are well known to take shortcuts, and use, mm, _creative_ means of getting around limitations."

"You mean human-rigging their stuff?" Irta smirked.

"That's racist, Irta," Rikwaal said coolly, making it clear that _she_ didn't care but as the project manager she had to pretend to.

"Oh, come on, they're so known for it we _named_ it for them."

"Yes, that would be the racist part."

"So they'd be a focus of interest just for that. What crazy idea will the Human come up with? What stupid and yet feasible methods will they implement? Will they go the long way around in a really entertaining way? Will they use nonsensical materials and overengineer it so they work? Or is it going to blow up in their, and our, faces?"

"Hmm," Bakoon said. "I'm beginning to see where you're going with this."

"Plus, a Human has never been on one of our teams before. I think we've only ever had two aliens, ever, and neither of them were Human. So they'll be interesting for that reason."

"Do you think we can possibly get enough points just from views that it'll compensate for poor skill and lack of creative ideas?" Rikwaal asked – not sarcastically, but as if she genuinely thought he was considering that idea, and wondering if she should too.

"No, because lack of creative ideas won't be a problem. We'll have a _Human_. Creative ideas are what they're _known_ for."

"Creative, completely impractical ideas," Enshru said.

"But gloriously impractical!" Bakoon said. "Yes, I see what you're thinking, Le'ir. A Human's creativity, plus the engineering skills of a team of Diwar... even if our implementation fails spectacularly, we'll gain enough from creativity and from the curiosity value of a _Human_ competing that we'll stand a chance! And if we should _not_ fail at implementation, because the Human gives us ridiculous ideas that work nonetheless and then we work them out with Diwar rigor, we may enter the 20th or 30th percentile. _Comfortably._"

"I don't like it! It's making a mockery of the whole competition!" Irta complained.

"Well, let's vote on it," Le'ir said reasonably.

Le'ir, Bakoon and Rikwaal all voted yes. Irta and Enshru voted no.

"That settles that, then," Rikwaal said.

"Wait!" Irta said. "We never asked Mip! For something like this? Working with a human? Having to make sure they have the right food and the right bathroom facilities available? We _have_ to give Mip a vote!"

Mip was an engineer of a completely different type – he was the facilities guy, managing the computational arrays, the food service, the cleanliness of the workspace. Irta had a good point – Mip would be one of the ones most impacted by the presence of an alien.

However, when they brought him upstairs to vote and explained the situation to him, he said, "You dragged me away from my work for _this?_ Unbelievable."

"But you get a vote," Irta said. "You'd be the one to have to do all the extra work if we bring on a human!"

"I'd be doing extra work if you expanded the team to add another Diwar, too," Mip said, "and don't pretend you care about my workload, Mr. I'm-going-to-shed-my-feathers-all-over-the-arrays. Do whatever you guys want, I don't care if you want a Human or a giant frog." (Technically he did not say frog; the creature he was referring to was an aquatic reptile rather than an amphibian, and usually the size of a Human head, but in most other respects it strongly resembled a frog.) "Just let me get back to my work." 

As he stomped off, making sure they could hear every clatter of his talons on the deck plating, Bakoon said, "So, Le'ir, my boy. Let's talk. How were you planning to recruit your Human?"

"I hadn't really thought that far," Le'ir said. "I wasn't sure you guys would agree."

"And personally, I don't," Enshru said.

"Yes, yes, we know, Enshru. You've made your opinion _abundantly_ clear," Bakoon said. "Well. My family has trade dealings with Humans; I've dealt with them often. Let me be the one to find a Human for the team."

"This is a bad idea," Irta said, "and it'll probably end badly."

Rikwaal smirked. "But it'll be such fun to watch before it does."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Diwar belong to a universe I created because I was frustrated with "humans have a special quality of growth" or "humans are uniquely able to forge alliances" or other science fiction tropes about how special and wonderful humans are and why we are running an interstellar government despite all the other species having been around longer than us.
> 
> In this universe, humans are special because they like beer and kitty cats. Seriously. The galaxy's best engineers, who previously thought themselves to be alone in their love of fermented grains, traded technology with us and befriended us to get access to microbrews they'd never tried before, and the galaxy's most dangerous and feared warriors, a felinoid species, made friends with us because a Minnesota woman who was a colonist on a world they tried to steal from us decided to be neighborly with the kitty cats and bring them a fish casserole. Most worlds have cat-like beings -- it's one of the best designs for a land predator, so convergent evolution -- but Earth is the only one where they were small enough to make pets out of. So it's kind of like, you transfer to a new school and make friends with the smartest kid in the class and the bully who terrorizes everyone else.
> 
> Diwar were originally going to look something like dwarves. Then I thought, no, that's overdone, let's make them dinosaurs. So they were then modeled after velociraptors. And then I found out that dinosaurs had feathers and that chickens are very much like dinosaurs. So now Diwar are... kinda similar to giant chickens. If you picture giant chickens with beaky lizard snouts instead of full-on beaks, and arms instead of wings, and a second pair of arms doing the tiny T-rex arm thing on their fronts, you will have a good idea of what the Diwar look like.


	7. 7. Enchanted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original. A small ficlet about the life of a mage who survived being a teenage world-saver, saw her friends die, and now has turned her back on the world of magic, using it only to protect and care for her family in ways they can't detect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fish die in this one. If you are sensitive to the death of fish in fiction, or any animals, skip this.

The pet store cashier smiled at Amanda. "Your turtles must be going through a growth spurt. You're here almost every other day, aren't you?"

Amanda smiled back. "They're definitely getting to be big girls." She hefted the bag of feeder goldfish. "How are things going here?"

"Business is good, they keep me pretty busy," the cashier said. 

Amanda carried the goldfish out to the car. "Sorry, guys," she said, "but you'll probably have a longer life this way than if you'd _actually_ been bought as feeders."

There were no turtles.

Once she was home, she carried the bag of goldfish down to the third tank in the basement. She'd drained it and scrubbed it down and washed it multiple times before refilling the tank, and there it was, pristine and sparkling with well-aerated water bubbling through the system. Amanda poked a few tiny holes in the bag and put it in the tank, so the fish could get used to the temperature, and went over to check the other tanks.

Tank number 1 was still in great condition. A good, healthy number of fish swam around in it, leading a happy fishy existence. Two dead ones floated at the top, but the rest were in good shape, still.

The same couldn't be said for tank number 2. One of the fish had an eyeball hanging out of its head. At least four of them seemed to have ick, which had killed off the last set in tank 3. She counted up _five_ floating on the top of the tank. "You're not long," she said to the tank full of fish. "Sorry." Did a couple of months in a clean, not-overpopulated tank with plenty of food and medical care, when they'd otherwise have lived in an overcrowded tank until they were fed to predators, make up for the terrible last week or two when different maladies would strike them all down at random?

Tank 4 was still malfunctioning. _All_ the fish had died when the pump motor had shorted out and sent deadly electric current through the tank. Amanda hadn't gotten around to getting a replacement yet. 

They were dying faster than they usually died. She looked at the opal in the ring on her left hand. It was solid purple.

"What's going on, I wonder?" Maybe it was the fact that there were two tanks out of commission, and she'd only just added fish back to tank 3. But if that wasn't the problem...

"Hey, Mom!" Arista yelled down the basement stairs. "Did you see what I did with my social studies textbook? The one I have to keep at home?"

"I have no idea," Amanda called back.

"But I _need_ it! I have a test to study for!"

"Then you should have kept better track of it!"

She took a deep breath. She was going to have to go upstairs and help Arista find the damn thing. And take Natalie to soccer practice. And Theo was suspiciously quiet, which usually meant he was up to no good. But before that she had to put the new fish into service.

In ancient, Homeric Greek, she murmured, "Blessed fates, let this fish be as my family in your eyes, and whatever darkness threatens to befall us, they will take that fortune onto themselves. Let this pact be sealed." A diabetic finger-prick device that she didn't actually need because she wasn't diabetic sat on top of the fish tank. She changed out the needle, used it to poke her finger to get a drop of blood, and squeezed the drop into the tank.

Gary asked her all the time why she even kept fish when they died all the time. After her first attempts to keep pretty, individualized fish that her children had gotten emotionally attached to, she'd taken to filling the tanks with feeder fish. They weren't all that attractive. He pointed out, quite reasonably from his perspective, that there seemed to be little point to having tanks full of unattractive fish in the basement that always died anyway. Why not keep a pet that would survive better?

She couldn't very well tell Gary the truth – that she was a magus; that she had been trained to channel power by speaking words in a dead language, in her case Homeric Greek, to make the universe do her bidding; that the fish lived in her basement to absorb magical attacks and ill fortune that was aimed at her and her family; that the fact that so many were dying, so quickly, meant that someone was most likely targeting her. And Gary. And their children. 

The color of her ring faded from dark purple to a lighter shade. Not completely turned to white, not entirely safe... but better. 

"I'd be able to find it just fine if you didn't keep moving everything around!"

She sighed. "I 'move everything around', as you put it, because you kids leave your stuff everywhere." Amanda headed up the stairs. "Where did you last see it?"

Tomorrow she'd get a new motor for tank 4, and new fish. If she was being targeted, she'd need _all_ the tanks in service.


	8. 8. Frail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set in the universe of "No Drama", a novel I described as "Q, Trent Reznor and a plucky photographer go on an expedition through time to prove that God is a corrupt politician of a race of post-eschatonic omnipotent beings." In this, we find out what counts as being disabled among gods, and our hero goes to visit his best friend.

So the first thing I need to explain before I tell you about meeting Heph is his name.

Humans call me John Deer (it’s a joke. Their name for a man who has no name is John Doe, but a doe is a female deer. I don’t technically have one of their genders, strictly speaking, and if you go by the body I’m in, it’s not female, so I thought I’d go by John Deer. Turns out the joke’s on me; add a silent e to the name and it’s a company that makes tractors. Go figure.) However, as I hope would be obvious, that’s not my real name. The Aleph don’t have physical bodies and aren’t made of matter and the pure information we _are_ made of doesn’t translate to syllables you or anything that makes sound can pronounce. If I were to translate my name, it would be impossibly long to convey in words; an Aleph’s name is, essentially, a hash function of our personality, the defining nature of our being. I’m not going to stand here and recite my entire personality to you, or anyone else’s entire personality, either, and don’t expect any other Aleph to do so.

So when we walk among pre-eschatonic species, we generally go by the names of gods in their language, or animals of symbolic value (which on most planets, for many groups on that planet, are indistinguishable from gods), or Virtue Names like “Patience” (that one is definitely not mine). And then, when we speak to one another with our meat mouths because we’re in meat bodies, we use _those_ names, the use-names specific for that planet, that culture, that language. On Earth, in English-speaking languages (as well as a significant number of the other ones), I’m known to other Aleph as Fox, Ferret or Weasel, depending on their current opinion of me. My opponent goes by the Lion, or the Ape. But Heph doesn’t use animal names; for the past several hundred years, when he walked on this planet, he called himself Hephaestus. The Greek God of engineering, smithing and invention – technology, in other words – who also happened to be crippled. I think it would be hard to find a myth better suited to be Heph’s use-name.

You see, Heph was born damaged. (We aren’t “born” like you’re born, messy screaming infants coming out of a parent’s orifices. A seed is woven by an entire team of Aleph who’ve chosen to procreate and gotten permission to do so, and then that seed grows fractally. So we are a little less random than spinning the Wheel of Sperm and Ova like you guys do… but not _much_ less random.) By the time he was grown enough that anyone was able to notice the damage, it was too late to correct him without making major changes to his essence, and most Aleph would have to be dying before they’d consent to that (if then. Personally I’d rather die.) It’s hard to explain what the problem is to a non-Aleph, so I need to draw an analogy. In essence… his bandwidth is too low. He cannot quickly upload anything to the Host, and he doesn’t have the storage capacity for the energy we draw down to do our reality-altering things. Where the rest of us are gods, Heph is barely a guardian spirit.

Back when we were both living in the Host most of the time, I am… ashamed to admit that I overlooked Heph, the way almost all the Aleph do. He can’t join with one of us – well, he _can_, but it’s shallow because of his low bandwidth. Not to be crude about it but it’s as if one of your males was trying to make love to a woman with the vaginal depth of a tea saucer. It… doesn’t do a lot for most Aleph. He can’t participate in most of the things we do because he can’t store enough energy to do it. So he isolates himself from us, and we let him do it because we’re all kind of at a loss as to how you include a guy who can’t do 90% of what you take for granted.

Heph, however, is _very_ smart. All Aleph are by human standards, but Heph is by _our_ standards. So he found a way around the problem.

When I met him on Earth, I was dying in a gutter. I’d been sentenced to a decade of being locked down to a single mortal body, and since I’d been on Earth when they grabbed me and put me on trial, it was Earth they sent me back to. Specifically, Victorian England. Naked, and with no money. Or antibodies. I ended up in a workhouse, where as you can imagine I did fantastically well since I’ve always been so eager to do pointless busywork and follow orders. The main punishment for disobedience was not being fed, followed by being held in a cell for a day and then given clothes that were supposed to shame you. I had no sense of shame, but I got a lot less food than the body I was in needed, and I was surrounded by people who were not in the best health. When I couldn’t work anymore and I was delirious with fever, they threw me out to be picked up with the rest of the refuse, assuming I’d be dead by morning.

Heph was on Earth too. He tracked me down, using technology he’d created. That’s Heph’s thing. He creates technology to compensate for his weaknesses. We have safeguards against anyone or anything but a recognized member of the Host drawing on power, so his tech can’t do all the shiny things a full-powered Aleph can, but we have plenty of access protocols to reach the database of knowledge. So he was able to find me. No Aleph was _supposed_ to render me aid, but Heph was not afraid of pulling the cripple card to get away with doing anything he’d been forbidden to do that he nonetheless decided was the right thing to do. He may be one of the smartest of us, but most Aleph treat him as if he’s not particularly bright, just because he can’t output his thoughts as fast as the rest of us, or fork himself and multi-process. And he made sure not to give me any aid that only an Aleph would be capable of. He fed me bread mold, a powerful antibiotic – you know it as penicillin – that humans happened to not have discovered yet, and pumped sugar, water and saline solution directly into my veins with a sterile glass tube ending in a needle, which humans would later refer to as an IV once they’d invented it. It was all with materials that could be found on Earth, that humans _could_ have discovered (and in fact did, later on.)

I didn’t know my sentence was for a decade. Nobody had told me there was a time limit. I thought they’d left me on Earth to die. Heph restored meaning to my life. The Host as a whole may have abandoned me, but one specific Aleph still cared, and went well out of his way to take care of me. Heph’s not known for being a fluffy, love and compassion kind of guy; he’s cold, aloof, introverted, with difficulty outputting his emotions in a format most Aleph can read, and his shallow bandwidth means that if an Aleph tried to probe him directly, it would cause him a lot of pain. Which, since we are a compassionate species, meant no one was allowed to probe him without his permission. Which he never gave.

In those days, Heph had been tall and broad-shouldered, still going with the whole blacksmith motif. He was never ripped like a bodybuilder, but his upper body had some substantial muscle to it. He’d affected black curly hair and bronze skin like the Greeks he’d named himself for. And he’d worn thick spectacles and walked with a cane. I’m not sure whether he does it on purpose or whether it’s a subconscious compulsion, but every body Heph creates for himself in matter has damage to mobility and damage to perception, representing what he suffers in his true form. I tend to think Heph identifies so strongly with being disabled, he can’t imagine having a form that isn’t.

Ten years before I’d even learned the sentence was finite. Heph had known, but hadn’t been allowed to tell me – and while obviously he thought he could get away with saving my life and being my companion and showing me how to survive as a human, equally obviously he didn’t want to disobey the Host in the matter of telling me my sentence. Their logic was that it was hardly an aspect of being _mortal_ to know for a fact that if you just survive long enough you’ll get your immortality back. The truth was, of course, the Lion had had the judges in his pocket. We hated each other even then; that’s why I started investigating him. He had them do it to be pointlessly cruel, and they came up with a rationalization to the rest of the Host. Well, in those ten years, Heph became my best friend. Raven and Cat and Monkey, my other close friends, hadn’t come to visit. Even Isis, who treated me like I was her little brother and used to watch out for me when we were millions of years younger, left me there. Heph was the only Aleph willing to risk the displeasure of the Host to be my friend.

So as soon as I came back to Earth, I looked him up, of course.

I’m kind of in the same boat he’s always been in; I _have_ my powers, but the moment I draw down energy to do anything major, or even upload any complex hand-rolled query, my memories upload to the Host. And I’m _absolutely sure_ that the Lion is going to honor the law and not seek to obtain illicit access to privacy-locked memories. Yup. Positive. So the moment I use my powers, my enemy gets to see exactly what I’ve been thinking and planning up to that point. Which means I can’t use my powers for anything short of “my physical body has just been killed and I need to upload or I’ll actually die.” But locating a fellow Aleph is such a common query, we have a wizard for it, which can be triggered without uploading – and while my privacy lock keeps that particular simple query from finding _me_, Heph’s never felt the need to hide.

But I gotta admit I was kind of shocked when I saw his new body.

He recognized me, of course. “Fox. Come on in.”

Heph was living in a farmhouse that he’d converted to his brand of tech wonderland, probably because he wanted to have enough land between him and his human neighbors that no one called the cops for strange noises or mysterious lights. I stepped over several gadgets of unknown function, following Heph to the kitchen. “You still drink tea?” he asked me.

“Uh, yeah, what have you got?”

“Oolong, chai, green with ginger, peach chamomile, Earl Grey, and hibiscus.”

“Gimme the chai.” The last time we’d met, chai had been something you’d only get if you were actually in India.

I made my way to his kitchen table, which was covered with papers and had what looked like two laptops sitting on it. I happened to know they were laptops the way desktop computers are abacuses, but humans probably wouldn’t have been easily able to tell the difference, unless they knew the Unix operating system well enough to know that Heph was _not_ running a variant of it. Heph pushed the papers out of the way on one of the chairs, giving me a clear spot to sit down, as he remote-activated a teakettle with his mind.

“What brings you back to Earth?” he asked.

“Before we get into that, I need to address the elephant in the room, Heph.”

“No one here goes by Elephant.”

If I hadn’t known Heph as well as I did, I might not have guessed he was telling a joke; he was completely deadpan. “Yeah yeah. _What_ have you done to your use-form?”

Like I said, the last time I’d seen Heph, he’d been built, matching the crippled blacksmith stereotype. Now… he was still tall. That was about the only point of resemblance. He’d gone for a pasty white, skinny form with long blond hair in a ponytail, thick glasses with a tint to them so I couldn’t really see his eyes well, and his body looked like it would blow away in a strong wind. There was a visible brace on his left leg, and he dragged it very slightly when he walked. Heph had always made his use-forms disabled, but there’s disabled and then there’s “looks completely helpless.”

“This is the new look for the 21st century technologist,” Heph said.

“It looks like the consumption chic that was going around in Byron’s day. Do you eat? At all?”

“Sure. Chips, pizza, burgers. All of the fatty, unhealthy stuff that modern technology gurus poison themselves with when they’re crunching on a project, which is all the time.”

“Great, so you’re not just incredibly skinny, you also probably have a dozen vitamin deficiencies. Heph. You gotta keep that body _running!_ With your upload time—”

“Thanks, I’m aware of my upload time. And I’m pretty sure you didn’t drop in on me just to tell me I’m too thin.”

“I’m _worried_ about you. You look like one high fever could do you in.”

“They’ve invented a lot more antibiotics than they had around when you got sick. Listen, Fox, I get that you’re worried, but I’m not trapped like you were. If something goes wrong with this body because it’s too fragile to survive, which is highly unlikely anyway, I’ll have enough time to upload. I’ve got plenty of equipment to scan it for health.” He got to his feet with some difficulty and limped over toward the singing teakettle.

“What was wrong with the old one?”

“Firstly, too many photographs got taken of it. I had to fake my death so I didn’t have uncomfortable questions about why I looked exactly like my great-grandfather.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before posing for photographs right after they were invented.”

“It’s not the Victoriana I was concerned with, it was more the World War II era stuff. And secondly, it’s the aesthetic. Today people don’t think of blacksmiths when they think of technology. They think of autistic white men with bad vision.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did you actually give yourself autism or is that just a metaphor?”

“Look the definitions up, I am actually the closest thing to autistic the Aleph have ever produced.” He came over to the table with my tea. I didn’t try to help him or intercept him. Quite aside from the fact that he’d find it insulting, he had so much junk on the floor that his knowledge of what to step over and when made him more mobile than I’d be. “But stop trying to sidetrack me. What are you doing on Earth?”

If another Aleph had asked that question, there might have been all kinds of subtext in there. _Are you in exile again? Have you gone native after spending ten years as a mortal here? Don’t you have anything better to do?_ From Heph, it more or less meant exactly what he’d asked. “Can’t tell you unless you’ve run a backup,” I said, taking a sip of the tea.

Heph rolled his eyes. “You’re so dramatic,” he said. “Look at this.” He got up again and dodged some more junk on the floor, making his way toward what the people who’d built this place probably thought of as a family room or maybe sitting room. I followed, feeling like a drunk guy in a china shop. My personal aesthetic has never been tiny, delicate motions, so getting anywhere across Heph’s floor without breaking his stuff was like a minefield, except with fewer actual explosions, I hoped.

It was a metal box. “Very impressive,” I said. “I especially like the craft in the solder lines.”

“Don’t be an ass. Here.” He unlatched a latch I hadn’t recognized and lifted the lid. Inside was a crystalline array of the kind the Aleph used to use before we shifted to encoding our data in neutron stars. “Local backup device.”

I tried not to look impressed. Of _course_ Heph had a local backup device. I was kicking myself for not assuming he’d have created such a thing. “Does it work?”

“I changed my use-form. How do you think I did that without it being a major pain in the rear?”

That was a good point. Heph’s bandwidth was low enough that it would take him a couple of days to upload to the Host. Changing bodies would have involved creating a new form, uploading out of it, and then downloading into the new one… which was a problem if it took you two days to upload or download, because your physical body might very well die on you or suffer brain damage while you were imperfectly socketed in it. I felt a lot better about Heph’s frailty now. “How long does it take to transfer to that?”

“I’m running delta backups every time I sleep, so if the body were to die unexpectedly, I’d only need to transfer at most a day’s worth of memories and experiences. Probably 20 minutes at a maximum. Also, if it wasn’t obvious to you, I’m not doing regular backups to the Host and I can tag data to keep it out of the upload when I do, and there’s no way any other Aleph is getting into my local backup server. It’s not even connected to the Host except when I run uploads from it.”

Okay. His memories weren’t accessible to the Lion either. That meant it was safe to tell him the details of what I was up to. I made my way back to the table with my teacup. “So, this is going to be a long story…”


	9. 9. Swing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Got behind, but catching up. 
> 
> A very strange hero saves a child from being a human sacrifice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ficlet features a character based on one created by my son Alex. Alex's character Reginald is a styrofoam bust, who was alive in the 1920's, who uncontrollably possesses everyone around him and compels them to dance while swing music plays. I wanted a character who could be a weird-ass hero rather than an SCP, so mine is Aloysius, a mannequin, who may or may not have ever been alive and who can control who he possesses. The dancing while swing music plays is still crucial, though.

The child struggled against the hands of the cultists holding him down, yelling curses that some might falsely believe a child his age wouldn’t know. He kicked his arms and legs wildly and tried to bite the arms of his captors. It didn’t help.

The cultist standing behind the child’s head, the one holding the knife, spoke. “O Great One, accept the sacrifice of this innocent! Feed on its soul—”

“I’m not an _it_, you motherfuckers—”

“—restore your strength, and rise from your—”

A sound that had been gradually getting louder became recognizable finally as the sound of… a swing band, playing _In the Mood._ It was distracting enough that the cultist holding the knife lowered his hand slightly. “What the hell is that?”

It was a good question. The cultists had gathered in a temporarily closed, underground Metro station in DC, dozens of feet below the ground. It was late at night, when the Metro wouldn’t be running anyway. The construction workers on the expansion project that had required the closure were union, and definitely not on site this late. There was no earthly reason for the cultists to be interrupted by _anyone_, much less music from the 1930’s being played very, very loudly…

…Or maybe not at all. A mass of people emerged from the tunnel into the dim light from the cultists’ electric lanterns. Many of them were wearing pajamas; others were wearing evening wear, the kind you’d wear to go clubbing. A few women of a certain age and their grey-haired male partners were wearing ballroom fashion. A lot of them were teenagers and young adults in hoodies or t-shirts.

All of them were dancing, most in pairs, swinging their partners around to the beat as their arms and legs moved to more complex rhythms. There was a man in the front, however, who danced alone, his legs tapping out a pattern similar to the Charleston, but with more complicated flourishes and a lot of finger-snapping. He was dressed snappily but anachronistically, in a light green suit styled after the 1920’s, with a black homburg on his head, sporting a green ribbon the same color as the suit.

There was no evidence anywhere of where the music was coming from.

“Who the hell are you?” asked one of the cultists, reaching for his own weapon. The ceremonial knives were for the sacrifice; for defense, the cultists carried guns.

“Now, this is a swell setup you’ve got here,” the man in the green suit said. “Nice and private. I can see why you’d pick out a joint like this for your party. But you need to light this place up! Can’t have a really ritzy shindig when it’s this dim!”

“They’re not having a party,” the boy being held on the ceremonial table yelled, “they’re trying to k—” A cultist managed to cover his mouth without getting bitten.

The lights in the subway station blazed to life, twice as bright as they’d normally be in a station that was actually operating, and the dancers, who were on the tracks on both sides of the platform, could now be seen climbing up off the track and onto the platform, everywhere.

The lead cultist looked around at the mass of dancing people, and made a bad decision. “Shoot them! Shoot them all!”

This proved to be much more difficult than one would think. The dancers effortlessly swung each other out of the line of incoming fire, while other dancers swung in to grab cultists from behind or the side, pull the guns out of their hands, and dance away. Three of the cultists didn’t escape; when a dancer grabbed them and swung them around, they started dancing too.

Meanwhile the man in the green suit was dancing closer and closer to the boy and the lead cultist. Most of the cultists were at this point engaged in combat with dancers, who were humiliating them completely by dancing with them rather than fighting, and still managing to win. It was as if all the dancers were animated by a single hive mind, moving in perfect cooperation, able to see every angle that attackers might be striking from and responding with perfect rhythm.

“Stay back!” the lead cultist yelled, holding the boy down with one hand on his chest, the knife to his neck. “I’ll kill him!”

“You’re going to bump off a poor little bunny like that?” the man said. “That’s disappointing, fella. After I came all this way to meet the poor kid?”

Suddenly, the boy grabbed the cultist’s wrist with both his hands – which were no longer being held by other cultists, since the other dancers had pulled them away – and shoved it away from his neck, far enough that he could twist out from under the cultist and roll off the table. “You came to rescue me?”

“Posi-lutely,” the man assured him.

The cultist dropped his knife. “The Great One will not be denied!” he snarled, and pulled a gun.

Before he had a chance to fire it, the man had skidded across the floor in a move Fred Astaire might have envied, sliding right under the cultist’s gun arm. With a single smooth move, he pulled the gun arm, flipping the cultist to the ground and sending the gun flying, using the momentum to push himself to a standing position. “Hey, fella, if you’re gonna be packing heat, you should learn to stay in the kitchen,” he said, and proceeded to dance on the fallen man, kicking him in the head a few times as part of his dance routine.

The music had never stopped, and it had never become apparent where it was coming from.

The rumble of a Metro train sounded in the distance – impossible, since the station was closed and the Metro wasn’t running at this time, and yet there it was. With a big grin on his face, the man in the green suit heaved the lead cultist up. “Come on, you big palooka, the dance ain’t over yet! Show me your steps!”

The cultist’s hood had fallen off, revealing a gray-haired man with ruddy skin and a very sweaty face. His eyes went wide. “No! _No!_ You won’t take me – I belong to the Great One! I—”

“Suit yourself,” the man in the green suit said, spun in place, and kicked the cultist, hard, sending him flying onto the track – just as the train came in.

The boy looked around. All of the other cultists were dancing now, most having shucked off their robes for freedom of motion. The train was very, very short – just one car, almost unheard-of for a Metro train – and in the driver’s seat at the front of the car, there was a nattily dressed mannequin, wearing very similar clothes to the man in the green suit. The mannequin wore glasses, and seemed to have glass eyes rather than the smooth indents that suggested eyes that most mannequins the boy had seen sported.

“Well! Here I am!” the man in the green suit said. “Let’s get you aboard, young fella.”

“What the _hell_ just _happened?_” the boy asked. “Why is there a train in a closed station? Who are _you?_ Who were those assholes who tried to kill me? Why is a mannequin driving the train? Where’s the music coming from? Why is everyone dancing?”

The man laughed. He didn’t stop dancing. “I’m the mannequin, kiddo,” he said. “Name’s Aloysius, but you can call me Al.”

“Wait a minute, how can you be the mannequin?”

“Well, this fella dancing in front of you’s named Henry, and he’s got no life, so I lent him mine. The rest? They’re my backup dancers.” He snapped his fingers in time to the beat, which had changed from _In the Mood_ to something else the boy didn’t recognize, but it sounded like the same time period.

“But… some of them were the guys in the cult robes, and now…”

“Ah, don’t go getting the heebie-jeebies on me, kid. There ain’t too many fellas – or dolls, neither – who can resist dancing when I’m around. That’s all.” He gestured to the train car, which was filling up with dancers. “But they can’t dance all night, and you and me’ve got places to go, so how about let’s blouse!”

“Let’s _what?_”

“Amscray. Get on the train and vamoose. Come on, kiddo, we haven’t got all night.”

It occurred to the boy that being in an abandoned Metro station, far from his home, which would probably lose all its lights as soon as the mysterious being and his impossible train car left the station, was probably a worse fate than riding on said impossible train car. The man – Al – or Henry? What did you call a guy who was a mannequin whose mind was puppeting another guy’s body? – he’d said he’d come here to see the boy, and he’d saved the boy from the cultists. And since the boy had no idea why the cultists had picked him to kidnap and sacrifice to their Great One, and Al seemed to…

“Yeah, okay, why the hell not.”

“Your ma’s gonna wash your mouth out with soap, you keep talking like that,” Al said, more as if he was imparting information than making a judgement.

The boy scowled. “Some of us live in the 21st century,” he said as he boarded the train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started this I had no idea that the child had any significance at all aside from being the sacrifice to be rescued. Then it turned out as I was writing that he is actually very important. When I figure out *why*, I can write the rest of this.


	10. 10. Pattern

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on the characters from "The Cold at the Heart of the Light", a novel about a supervillain who is trying to save her nemeses' mentor's baby from everyone, including the superhero team she considers her nemeses
> 
> This one is a look at Meg's teen years.

“The pattern’s going to be roughly the same in every cell you look at within a specific organism,” David said. “There might be some that stand out as different, mutations or chimerism or whatnot, and then of course there’s things like the symbiotic bacteria in our bodies, but the basic cells are all going to have the same pattern in them. Do you see it?”

How could she tell? There were so _many_ things that were the same in each of the rat’s cells, how could she pick out a specific pattern as being the DNA?

“It just – it’s a symphony, a tapestry,” Meg said. “How do I pull out individual threads? How do I hear specific instruments?”

“I don’t know,” David said, frustrated. “It’s not my power! I can see how chemicals interlock with each other, but what you’re doing is so much more complicated, and you know so much _less_ science and math than I do—”

“Well, excuse me for being in junior high,” Meg snapped.

“You’re not in junior high. You haven’t been in school at all for a year, and with a power like yours, and a mind like yours, that’s not okay.” David glared at her.

Meg huffed. “Oh, yeah, I’m just gonna go sit in class all day, in _high school_, with kids whose biggest issue is the bitch in the other homeroom who’s stealing her boyfriend, and then after I get home and do my homework, I’m gonna go kill some people for Mike. Right? That totally fucking makes sense.”

David took a deep breath. “You don’t belong in school. _No_ one belongs in school, it’s essentially a warehouse for children, with some stamping dice to crush them into similar patterns to maintain the status quo. But you need to be reading. I got you books on biology and chemistry—”

“They’re boring. They don’t feel like they have anything to do with what I see and feel and hear.” Meg couldn’t even describe what _sense_ she was using to detect things inside the rat. How could she compare what she was sensing with the dry, flat words on the pages of the books David had given her?

“Okay. Take me through it. What do you see?”

“It’s—more like hearing. I think. Like a piece of orchestral music, but there’s so many instruments.”

“And what can you tell from the music?”

“Um. It’s a rat. It’s sleeping – there’s chemicals in its body that are making it sleep, they don’t belong there. It’s female. Mostly healthy but it’s got fleas. All _kinds_ of yuck on its teeth.”

“Right. Now go deeper. Focus on a smaller part of the rat. Not the brain, that’s too complicated.”

“OK, I spy, with my super-power eye… a tail. Am I good with the tail?”

“Sure, the tail should be fine,” David said. “What can you tell me about the tail?”

“Uh, there’s bones all the way down,” Meg said. “Lots of bones, real small. I mean, even in comparison to the size of the rat. And there’s, uh, there’s tubes with blood in them – wait, veins, those are veins, right?”

“Veins, arteries and capillaries. Yes.”

“Okay, and there’s this spiderweb of things all over the place where… something is changing. I can’t tell what, but it’s like the spiderweb is lighting up.”

“Does it connect to a central trunk line running through the center of the bones?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess it’s doing that… so nerves, right.”

“Are there muscle fibers?”

The rat’s tail twitched. “I guess so. When I poke them, they make the tail move. I can see them get short and thick, or stretch out and get long.”

“Focus on them. Go deep.”

“Yeah, um… they’re made of… things. Bags. Little watery bags. Well, actually they are tubes but they’re tubes that are like bags. Sausage! Like it’s got a containing membrane on the outside and then all kinds of stuff on the inside.”

“Look at the stuff on the inside. Can you find another bag?”

“About forty billion of them…”

“I don’t – wait, you’re probably looking at mitochondria. And exaggerating. Look toward the center for a _larger_ bag than the forty billion tiny ones.”

“Yeah, I can feel that. Kind of squishy. It has… doors? Revolving doors? Does that make sense?”

“Yes, there are molecules whose function is to let things in or out of the nucleus by essentially bonding with that thing and inverting so the chemical they’re moving is on the opposite side. Look past the doors. There’s something in the center. Around 42 somethings, actually.”

“I thought it was 46.”

“That’s _us._ Humans. This is a rat, they have 42.”

“The secret meaning of life is ‘how many chromosomes does a rat have?’”

“Yes, Adams should have replaced the mice with rats. Mice have only 40. Also rats are smarter. Look at those chromosomes, please.”

“I – I can see them. They’re in colors.”

“Which colors?”

“I, uh. I don’t know. When I try to look at them hard they change, but it’s four colors. It’s always four colors. Sometimes it looks like it’s red, blue, green and yellow, and sometimes it’s more like brown and beige and grey and black, and sometimes it’s all different shades of purple—”

“Focus on the pattern. Can you see the patterns the colors make?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can hear them. They have a rhythm, they… that song. That song is everywhere in the rat. The whole song, the whole orchestra of the rat’s entire body, it’s all the songs from these things, repeating over and over with different instruments.”

“Change the pattern.”

“OK. Um, I can’t change red to blue or green to yellow; red and green always match and then blue and yellow match. I have to change two at the same time.”

“Change some and listen to the way the pattern changes.”

Meg was sweating, the rat becoming somewhat slippery in her hands, or rather her hands becoming too slippery to hold the rat. “I’m hungry and my head hurts, can we quit?”

“No. You’re in the genome. This is where it all happens, Meg, this is where you change the world. You can make a man grow an extra arm, but if you master this, you can make all his children have extra arms too.”

“I don’t want to change the world, I want pizza.”

David sighed explosively. “Just change something and see what it does.”

“I changed, like, five things, and it didn’t do anything.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense… oh, wait. It’s mRNA that does all the _work._ It’ll take time to propagate. Plus who knows what the genes you just modified do? You’ll have to work on a _lot_ of rats to get an idea of what to change.”

“There’s supposed to be more rats than people in New York.”

“That’s a myth, but there’s plenty of rats.” He took the rat from her and put it back in its cage. “All right, Meg. I’ll order us pizza, you go take a shower. You need it.”

Meg grinned. “Okay! I like that idea!” She adjusted something – she had no idea what – in her head to relieve the headache.

“I mean it, Meg. You need to read those books and you need to practice with more rats. Practice until it stops hurting your head and making you sweat like a teenage boy playing football in full gear in July.”

Meg stuck her tongue out at David and headed to the bathroom to take her shower.


	11. 11. Snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Princess Snow White and the evil Snow Queen? One and the same." (from https://sparkingstoryinspiration.tumblr.com/post/153882542407/some-fractured-fairy-tale-ideas)

My mother was a witch, but she died when I was too young to learn her craft from her. My stepmother was a witch, but she hated me and taught me nothing. Everything I know, I have learned for myself.

When the prince awakened me with a kiss, he expected me to be his wife, and I had no idea there was any other possibility. No, even to say that implies more questioning than I did. I had been raised a princess, taught that my value would be in marrying the prince of another land and securing an alliance for my father’s kingdom. When the prince said he would marry me, I did not particularly want to – I wanted to return to my simple life in the cottage, with my dwarven friends – but if I had been asked, I would have said I chose the marriage freely. Because I had been taught, this was my value, this was the most important task of my life. This was why the huntsman had spared me, why the dwarves had found me and cared for me. This was my purpose.

He was handsome, and I thought he was kind. Certainly he treated me as something lovely and precious to be protected, at first. On our marriage night, he demanded a husband’s rights, and I had been left ignorant of such things by my stepmother and how young I’d been when I went to live with seven wifeless men who would have died rather than corrupt my innocence with a hint of such knowledge. It was painful, and somewhat frightening, but he was the man whose kiss had awakened me from the sleep of death. I trusted him.

I should not have.

He invited my father and stepmother to the festivities after our wedding. Father bent a knee to him, pledging allegiance and fealty, for my prince’s kingdom was far vaster and more powerful than my father’s, and with my marriage to the prince and the fact that my father had never managed to get any heirs on my stepmother, my prince was now heir to both kingdoms. Still, I did not understand why my _father_ needed to swear fealty, until my prince confronted my witch stepmother.

He accused her of trying to kill me, the new queen-in-waiting of the land. He said that my father, recognizing his own culpability in letting his own queen have such free reign that she could arrange for my death without his knowledge, was abdicating to me… which meant, after our marriage, that he was abdicating to my prince, raising my prince up as the new king of our land, even though his father lived and so he was not king of his own land yet. And that meant that his word was law over my stepmother, the former queen.

He told her he had a gift for her, as the mother of his bride. His gift was a pair of red-hot iron shoes, and his men held her down and forced them onto her feet. She danced, screaming, trying to free herself from the horrible weights burning her feet. Witches have no power over iron. My prince made me watch until she fell over, the pain finally overwhelming her. His court physician declared her dead.

He thought he was giving me a gift. He thought I had wanted such a cruel fate for the woman who’d tried to kill me, the woman who, all my childhood, I had tried so hard to please and to imitate, to make her love me as my lost mother had loved me.

He did not want to hear that his gift had been unwelcome, that it had horrified and sickened me, that I grieved for that woman even after all she’d done to me. That I had hoped, now that I was married and no longer a threat to her power, that she could finally be a mother to me and teach me all the things my own mother had died before sharing.

I would like to say that it was that cruelty that hardened my heart against him, that I swore no forgiveness of his crime and stood firm against him for the rest of our marriage. But I was not so strong, then. Perhaps this horror was simply the way of kings and queens, the life I had been born to.

It soon became obvious that my new husband didn’t love me. He loved my beauty, he loved the lands he’d inherited by marrying me, but he had no love for me as a person. When I nearly died trying to bear our first child, and it was a daughter and stillborn besides, he had no comfort for me. He said that I had my mother’s weakness, that I would die in childbirth as she had, trying to bring forth my brother who lived five minutes after birth, and that I had better give him a healthy son before I died. Then he brought other women to his bed, so there would be bastard heirs to take the place of the child I’d never have if I died before a healthy babe came from my loins.

My mother’s books were my inheritance, of no interest to my husband. My stepmother’s mirror, as well, served me now, after I cut my finger on the single sharp edge on the top and let my blood run down the mirror’s surface. The mirror taught me, as my mother could not, as my stepmother did not.

First I wanted to know how to bring a healthy son to term. The mirror told me the ways I could ensure a healthy babe, but told me that whether it should be a son or a daughter was entirely the doing of my husband’s seed, and I could have no control. I demanded to know how my mother had created me, then, a daughter with skin as pale as snow and hair as black as night and lips as red as blood, if a man’s seed was what made a child a boy or a girl. The mirror told me it was done by sacrifice, and the price was too high. My mother had sacrificed my brother, unborn, unconceived, so that I would be the witch-daughter she wanted, and the magic that drained his life drained hers as well.

I could give my husband a son, by sacrificing my second-born child… which, given my family weakness and the near-death I’d already suffered bringing forth a dead child, might well take my own life. I did not love my husband – I had been prepared to love him, when he’d saved me, I had been eager to learn to love him, and then he had tortured my stepmother to death and beaten me for objecting afterward, because I hadn’t been _grateful._ I had no desire to die to fulfill his needs.

So I sacrificed something else. All the children I might ever have, all of the ability I would ever have to bring forth a child, for life and health. When he beat me, I healed. When he was cruel in our bed, I recovered. My womb did not quicken, but he couldn’t put me aside; I made his rule of my homeland legitimate. If I did not bear him a son, my father’s brother’s son, or his son after him, would take the crown when I died. His rage at my failure was great, but he couldn’t take out his anger at me as much as he wished; he didn’t know I had sold my future children for the ability to heal the hurts he inflicted. If I died with no heir, he lost my kingdom.

He found another way to hurt me.

I had no love for anyone in his court. His citizens were loyal to him alone, not me, for they knew where the power lay. The serving-women I’d brought from my own court blamed me for the death of my stepmother, the queen they’d been loyal to. But I had my pets, as I always had. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field came to me, just as they had when I’d lived with my dwarven friends. I shared my food with them, and gave them my love, and they returned it in full measure.

So my prince set his men to hunting the birds of the air, as they came to visit me, and he brought me their dead bodies as “gifts”, and dared me to show the “ingratitude” I had shown him when he’d given me the gift of a murdered stepmother. So many cruelties I’d held my tongue for, but this I could not bear. I let him see my anger, and my grief.

It was a mistake. He killed every animal he could find within range of the palace.

On that day, my heart turned as cold as ice.

I am a witch, the daughter of a witch, the step-daughter of a witch, and my mother bargained her life away to grant me power, and left me her books, and my stepmother left to me a magic mirror that could tell me anything I wished. I studied. I could not let my husband or any other person know what I was doing, or he would take even that from me. So I rose from my bed in the dark of the night, and found my way, without candle or lantern to light my way, to a secret room I had found, and there I made my studies.

People said the queen was ailing, wasting away. They saw the dark circles of exhaustion under my eyes, they saw how I fell asleep so easily during the day, and they said I was dying. This, at the least, led my husband to leave me alone. He had tormented me for daring to take naps during the day, but when he thought I might be dying, he feared the loss of my kingdom, so he let me be to gain my strength.

My nurses slept at night. They feared to admit to the king they had done so, and I was careful; I spelled them to sleep when it was too late for my husband to come and disturb me, and came back to my bedroom before the spell wore off. Neither was willing to admit to the other, let alone to the king, that they did not guard me in the night, so none knew I was unsupervised for hours in the darkness.

And when I knew. When I understood, when I knew what I would sacrifice, when I knew what I could do. I thought I could bargain with it. I snuck out of the palace and I took my horse and I rode back to where the dwarves had lived, where I had been happy. I thought I would take shelter with them, and blackmail my husband with the threat of what I could do if he should try to take me back.

But I found their cottage destroyed, the beds I had neatly made for them once upon a time chewed to pieces and infested with woodland creatures. I found the bones of two dwarves. It had been long enough that I couldn’t tell which two. I didn’t look for any more.

I returned home, and I shattered my mirror. And with the power I released, I created a swirling vortex that sent shards of the mirror throughout the land. Everywhere they touched the ground turned to ice. Everywhere they struck a person in the heart, they drained them of all love, of all feeling, and with that sacrifice fueled the spell.

In the palace, in the lands around the palace, in my homeland that I had suffered so much for and that had given me so little, in all the lands of my husband’s kingdom… the ground froze. The people froze. The snow fell, the snow I was named for, and it did not stop for forty days and nights.

The sacrifice I made was my humanity. My ability to love, to feel. The sacrifice I made was the lives of all the people in the two kingdoms that I supposedly ruled, that held me prisoner. The sacrifice I made was the humanity and the ability to love and feel of a hundred random men and women, girls and boys, scattered far outside my kingdom.

I will never have children, I will never have a love, I will never even have friends. All of this was true before my final sacrifice. By killing my last, dearest friends, my husband made it so.

He is still alive.

His arms are frozen in a block of ice. His legs are frozen. Ice covers his mouth and holds his head in place, so he cannot speak, or move anything but his eyes and their lids. But he can hear. No ice covers his ears. Or his eyes. He can see as well.

I stand before him, my black hair turned white with the power of my sacrifice, my lips once red as blood now bloodless and almost blue, but otherwise my beauty unchanged from the day he saw me in a sleep of death and decided he had to have me. And I laugh, and show off my wondrous kingdom of ice, and all of his subjects frozen and dead, and all of the treasures he held so dear _mine_ now, mine alone.

The spell that turned my kingdom to ice keeps me alive, but my hate and my desire for revenge keeps me willing to live. As long as the Empire of Ice stands, as long as the Queen of Snow rules, my husband will suffer at the hands of what he created with his cruelty.

As for the people that my spell sacrificed, the ones who lost their ability to love when the shards of my mirror pierced their eyes or their hearts… I intend to find them, the people who can no longer feel, and bring them to my palace to be my servants, citizens of the new Empire of Ice. And I, the Snow Queen, will rule over only them. For I have that much compassion, at least… a memory of having been compassionate, once upon a time. I will not bring anyone who truly lives or feels to live in the land of endless snow and ice, the land where love and kindness can no longer exist.


	12. 12. Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In order to go into space, a dragon needs to be Chosen by a 12-year-old human Companion. It's an huge commitment, though, and Ichtyrios isn't sure he's up to taking on a human for the rest of the human's life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far this has been my most popular ficlet. Who knew that a story about dragons in space taking humans as companion animals in order to parody companion animal tropes would be so popular? (Well, anyone who was paying attention, in retrospect.)

Ichtyrios bent his head very, very low to look inside the nursery. “They look so unfinished. Like fat little larvae. Do they undergo a metamorphosis?”

His companion, Ysabriem, laughed. “It’s a lot like that, but they never enter a cocoon… over the course of 12 years, they change into smaller versions of the full-grown ones. Before that age they need enormous amounts of care, and they’re not very useful. We start training them when they’re 5, teaching them mathematics and ciphering, and then the physical tasks around the age of 7.”

“But they’re not useful until they’re 12? That seems very odd. Aren’t they supposedly intelligent?”

“Oh, they’re _very_ intelligent. Excellent problem-solvers, and those tiny little digits of theirs are incredibly dexterous.”

“So why does it take them so long to become useful?” He lifted his head. “_Our_ young are born knowing enough to be fully functional even if their parents are dead.”

“Our young take 30 years to hatch. They grow their young in their bodies for not even a full year.”

Ichtyrios nodded, his talons reaching up to stroke his chin. “That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that. They’re halfway through their lives by the time one of us is ready to hatch.”

“Closer to a third, but yes.” Ysabriem began walking toward the Choosing creche. “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“It’s why I came, yes,” Ichtyrios said impatiently, huffing a quick puff of smoke. “I just – I’m not sure. A commitment of seventy, eighty years? Hardly forever, but it’s not trivial either.”

“It’s true,” Ysabriem said without looking back at him. “If you’re not prepared to make that commitment, you really shouldn’t take on a human Companion. They’re loyal, talented, smart and easy to train, and I’ve never known a dragon who regretted the decision… but that’s because every dragon who comes here to be Chosen is _certain._ You have to be sure before making the commitment.”

“What happens to them if it doesn’t work out? If the dragon dies while they’re still alive, or doesn’t get along with them and wants to give them back?”

Ysabriem shrugged. “Some Choose again, and become a different dragon’s Companion. Some never do; their hearts are broken, and they can’t bear to live among dragons again. We try to make sure only the most resilient ones are allowed to make the Choice, but humans are much more fragile than dragons, in more ways than just the obvious physical differences. Their emotions are nothing to toy with., Icht. If you’re not sure, I won’t allow a human to Choose you.”

“You don’t have one.”

“I’ve had two, in my lifetime. It’s… terrible, watching them die. One lived out her natural span, so at least I was expecting it… but the other one died fixing our ship’s reactor. Radiation poisoning. It’s a terrible way to go.” She sighed. “So I work with the nursery and the creche. I don’t have my own human anymore, but I get to see and care for hundreds of them, when they’re youngest and least likely to die.”

“But you gave up space for that?”

“Yes, well.” Ysabriem’s nictating eyelids slid closed, one of the few involuntary expressions of sorrow that dragons made. “I regret losing space, but I don’t regret not taking on a new companion and I don’t regret working with the young humans. Maybe someday I’ll feel able to go back out again, and on that day, I’ll present myself to the fledgling humans and see if any of them Choose me.”

“I want to go to space,” Ichtyrios said. “I’ve been all over the world. There’s nothing more to see here, no more lands to explore. We’ve colonized our entire world. I want to go places no dragon has ever been.”

“You hoard new experiences?” Ysabriem waved her tail in an expression of friendly cheer. “Many do. And you’re right, there’s no better way to experience things no other dragon ever has than to explore space. The humans – most of them – are driven by the same desire. They want to see things, to learn things and walk in places that no human has before.”

“They’re so small. So fragile.”

“They are, but they have to be. A dragon can’t work with the micrometer tolerances the engines need… not without tools, and most of our tools die in the magnetic fields we need to keep the fuel bottled and channeled. Humans are much more vulnerable to the radiation, but they’re small enough and their hands skilled enough that they can keep the engines maintained at nine nine’s of efficiency. No dragon has ever managed to pull that off; even when we’ve created experimental craft that don’t need a human’s touch, the best a dragon can manage is three nine’s. We’re just not evolved to care about problems so small; we can’t focus on that level of detail, not when there’s treasures to find. Plus, dragons without human companions have a bad habit of recklessly pursuing treasure and getting killed; we’re too used to being virtually invulnerable, but space can kill us too. Humans aren’t apex predators. They know they can easily be killed, and that makes them more cautious than dragons.”

“I’ve heard a rumor that dragons with human Companions go into heat or rut every time the human does?”

Ysabriem laughed puffs of smoke. “Oh – oh, dear me, no! I’ve heard that one too, and I have no idea why. Humans don’t go into heat, or rut. Or rather, they’re always there. A decade or less after you get your Companion, they’ll be seeking to mate with other humans virtually every chance they get. If you were influenced into heat or rut every time your human mated, you’d get nothing done!”

“Ah.” Ichtyrios laughed as well in relief. “That’s good to hear. I’d heard about the humans mating so frequently, and if your Companion mating causes you to go into rut—oh dear is _right_!”

“Also, they don’t have to mate with the Companion of your mate when you’re in mating season, you can’t read their minds, they can’t read your minds, they don’t kill themselves in grief when you die – though many humans will absolutely put themselves in grave danger to avenge you if what kills you is a living being, and Companions are chosen for their willingness to risk their lives to protect you and make sure you don’t die. Have I covered all the silly myths?”

“Most of the ones I’ve heard. But they do Choose us, not the other way around.”

“Right.” Ysabriem dipped her head to signal emphatic agreement. “Think about it. They’re choosing a dragon to be Companion to for their entire lives. Of course they need to be the ones to Choose.”

“How do they make the Choice?”

“Well, no dragon is completely certain how they do it… the human Elders keep that a secret. But we’re fairly sure that they teach the children what traits to look for in a dragon to match their own needs, and the children get to review the personality profiles of any dragon coming to the Choosing Grounds. We think sometimes that children who never pick a dragon had their heart set on one who applied to present themselves to be Chosen, but then never showed up.”

“Wait. So you’re saying there might be a human who’s _already_ Chosen me?”

“I know, it seems a little less magic than the thought that they can just look at you and know – and you know, it’s possible they’re doing some of that, too. Humans have very little genetic diversity; they come in ranges of basically three colors, they’re all within around 15% of the same size, and there’s nothing about their face shape, body type or coloration that says anything about their personality. To them, the fact that you can tell certain things about a dragon’s personality from our color, size, body shape or the types of ridges and ruffs we have on our bodies must seem like we’re an open book, in comparison to them. But we do think they’re studying more than that about us, before they make their Choice. So… yes, it’s possible there’s a human who’s already decided to Choose you.”

For some reason that was what made Ichtyrios’s decision for him. If a human didn’t Choose him this time around, maybe he’d rethink his decision, but for now… what if there was a human who wanted to be his Companion already, who’d been studying him and dreaming of being his personal assistant and traveling in space with him, and he didn’t show up and that human’s fragile heart was broken? Humans were far more sentimental and far more social than dragons; they _needed_ the presence of other sapient beings far more than dragons did, and the loss of a person’s presence when they expected one could do them actual physical damage, or at least Ichtyrios had been so taught.

He didn’t want to harm the human who possibly already loved him and dreamed of being his friend by not showing up for that human to Choose him.

“All right,” he said. “All right, I’ll do it. Take me to the creche for the Choosing. I want to meet the humans.”

“And you’ll take whichever one Chooses you as your Companion for the rest of its life, caring for it through illness, injury and senescence, providing for its every need – including the need to express and receive affection from its Companion?”

Ichtyrios dipped his head. “I’m ready to make a commitment, yes. I want space… and I want to meet whatever human might decide to Choose me.”

“Then follow me,” Ysabriem said. “The Choosing is in two hours. You won’t want to miss it.”


	13. 14. Overgrown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So totally not in order. Set in the same universe as "The Cold At The Heart of the Light", featuring another Proxima -- people born with the capacity for superpowers. Meet Max, who got one of the most villainous powers possible and decided to turn it into a career that benefits people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt 13 is supposed to be "Ash". Still haven't figured out what I'm doing with it, and my original plans for #15 Legend and #17 Ornament fell through and had to be reworked, so we are not remotely in order anymore.

Max looked over the yard. “Yikes.”

The executor nodded. “It looks like they didn’t do anything to take care of the yard for the past 10 years. When Walter died, the paramedics had to borrow a weed clipper from the wife to get the walkway wide enough that they could get the stretcher through.”

“My God,” Max said. “Is – was there any chance they could have saved his life otherwise?”

“Oh, no, I’m sure there wasn’t,” the executor said. “He was pronounced DOA. But Helen wants to sell the place and move to an assisted living community. Apparently Walter’d been telling her for ten years that he was having things taken care of – either he was doing the chores, or he was having a landscaper come by, or something – and with her being mostly bed-ridden, she took his word for it.”

“That poor woman. She really hasn’t left her house in ten years?”

“Aside from going outside to bring in grocery and package delivery, neither did Walter. We’ve found a few paths he made through the underbrush to get to the gate where they’d leave the packages, but they weren’t big enough to bring the stretcher through.” The executor shook his head. “The best we can figure, either he was a hoarder of garden vegetation, or he had the worst cast of procrastination anyone’s ever seen.” He gave the suburban jungle one last eyeing-over before turning to Max. “What can you do with this?”

“A lot,” Max said, “but too much of that growth is woody for me to just make it all disappear. When green-stem plants die, like flowers and tomatoes, they just collapse to the ground, but woody plants like trees and shrubs and some kinds of vine will still be there when they die… they won’t continue to grow, their roots will shrink and they’ll dry out and be easier to dig out or cut down, but it’s still going to take some work to remove them.” He pulled at a woody vine that had completely swallowed the white picket fence… at least he _thought_ it was probably a white picket fence from the tiny bits of picket that showed through the vines.

“Well, any cost from landscapers coming in and cutting down whatever’s left after you do your job will be more than made up for by what Helen can get from selling the house, and it would cost a _lot_ more to have them cut it all down while it’s alive.”

“Not to mention the rats.” Max looked at the executor. “You _did_ know about the rats, didn’t you?”

“Uh… no. Helen didn’t mention rats.”

“Just for due diligence, she doesn’t have a family of pet possums or a colony of feral cats living on the property, does she?”

“She has two cats, they’re indoor cats and fixed.”

“And they’re not on the property anymore? It’s important that nothing she wants alive should be on the property at the moment.”

“I get that.” The executor’s smile was nervous. Max took a step away from the man, casually, as if he was inspecting the vines, and saw out of the corner of his eye the executor relax slightly. “She’s got her cats with her, I believe.”

“Staying with kids or something?”

“No, a friend’s house. Walter and Helen never had any kids.” The executor snorted. “If they _had_, I’d be having words with those kids now. Walter was obviously mentally ill or something, and Helen wasn’t physically capable of enforcing him dealing with the yard even if she knew there was a problem, but if they had kids, there would be _no_ excuse for anyone letting their parents live like this.”

“There’s some smallish creatures in the house. Can we confirm she doesn’t have fish, or other terrarium pets she might have left behind?”

“Huh. She did go to her friend’s in a hurry; it’s not like she’s moved out yet. I’ll check.”

While the executor called the widow to confirm whether or not the lives Max was sensing in the house were wanted or not, Max walked along the fence. Most of the life he was going to have to deal with was deep inside, nowhere near the fence. It was a large property, and he wasn’t going to be able to do it by radiating an area of effect, since there were neighbors. He sighed. Dammit, he was going to have to get the hedge clippers himself, or a machete or something, just to get deep enough into the yard to be able to do his job.

“I don’t get paid to be a gardener,” he muttered.

Well, he didn’t get paid to be a plumber either, but there’d been that colony of mutant amphibious mice that he’d had to track through the pipes in that one house. And at least the homeowner was willing to make a clean sweep, none of “don’t touch my prize rosebushes but get everything else”.

Still, he made a mental note to quote the executor a 20% increase in his usual fee.

“Good news,” the executor said. “Nothing in the house is supposed to be alive.” A little nervously, he asked, “How do you know there’s living things in there? Can you tell what they are?”

“I can tell their approximate size, and, vaguely, about how high off the ground they are,” Max said. “What I’m seeing could be consistent with pet fish, or animals in terrariums… or it could be a few colonies of mice living in the walls. There’s also a _lot_ of insect life, all over. Uh. I think maybe you’re gonna want to check for termite damage after I’m done.”

“Wait, there are termites?”

“Some kind of insect living in parts of the wall that I think might be studs,” Max said. “Could be something like powder post beetles if there’s wooden furniture up against the walls.”

“But you can take care of them?”

“Sure can, but I can’t fix the damage they might have done, so get the place inspected thoroughly before you put it on the market. I can certify that I treated the place for you, once I’m done; I’m licensed to certify state-approved no-toxin extermination was performed. There’s bedbugs, too. That’s _weird_ for people who never leave the house.”

“I’ll just… have the mattresses burned.”

“No need, I can deal with those little suckers too, including the eggs. But the mattresses should be thrown out; there’s gonna be tiny little bloodstains all over them. Nothing bio-active, but people looking at it won’t be able to tell it’s been sanitized. Don’t burn them, the chemicals mattresses are made of turn toxic when you set them on fire.”

“Anything else?”

“Major flea infestation. Those poor cats. Let the friend know and get the homeowner have them professionally treated right away.”

“Is that something you could do?”

“Not without making the cats sick. I don’t do parasites on living creatures; I’m an exterminator. I kill stuff. People aren’t a big fan of exposing their pets to things that kill stuff.” It wasn’t impossible; he’d killed skin cancer once, and the person who’d had the melanoma was still alive, but it was delicate work and dangerous and he’d only done it because his friend hadn’t had insurance and he’d been terrified the thing would metastatize before his friend could raise the money for chemo. Also because chemo was probably worse for people overall than one exposure to a pinpoint death touch. Cats were more fragile than people anyway.

“Okay, I’ll let Helen and her friend know. If Helen’s cats infest her friend’s house with fleas, you’d be able to help with that, right?”

“Yep, with all the usual caveats. Get your pets out of the house for the day, that includes any fish, prized houseplants, and if you want me working on your garden you show me every plant you don’t want dead when I’m done, yadda yadda.”

“Sounds good. So when do you want to get started on Walter and Helen’s yard here?”

Max pulled out his phone, did some quick calculations, and presented the executor with the total. “You can give me a check now, or you can call my secretary and give her the credit card number over the phone.”

“We’ll do a check, that’s simplest.” The executor didn’t even blink at the price. Silently Max kicked himself for not raising the price even higher.

“And I’m gonna need those hedge clippers.”

“I figured as much.”

***

Half an hour later the executor was gone, driven off to get lunch or something, far more than a safe distance away. Max could sense as far as a city block, but he had no idea if he could actually drain life that far away, because he’d never tried.

Numerous supervillains had tried to recruit him since he’d discovered his powers around the age of 14, but Max thought that capes were, in general, ridiculous people. Well, the Peace Force were all right, as heroes went, and his doctor was great despite being a supervillain in her spare time, but why the hell would he ever want to work a job where the entire reason he was on board was to threaten to kill people, or actually do it? He still had nightmares about his grandfather’s death, and the man had been in his 60’s, old enough to die of a heart attack even if Max had had nothing to do with it. Max felt bad when he accidentally killed someone’s pet goldfish – which had happened, in the beginning of his career, because idiots heard “get your pets out of the house” and for some reason mentally tacked on “except for your fish, they aren’t really alive.” Why would he ever want to kill anything another person cared about, let alone a person themselves? Hell, the only mammals he was cool with killing were the rats and mice, and that was mainly because they carried disease and ate people’s food. He wouldn’t take on rural assignments, they kept wanting him to dispose of bunny rabbits and gophers. No thanks. And he didn’t do birds. Pigeons were beautiful creatures and geese were shitheads but mostly just because they weren’t scared of humans, and Max respected that.

His extermination business was certified by the state to be wholly organic and no-toxin, which was good for the environment and for the health of the people he helped. From Max’s perspective, he’d taken a power that terrified most people and kind of screamed “supervillain” to anyone who paid attention to capes, and used it to improve the life and health of people and their pets.

He started at the gate, where the paramedics had hacked a pathway to the house wide enough to get the stretcher through. The pathway was partly the actual original walkway, partly ground that had once been occupied by tall pokeweed plants. As Max walked along the path, he cast his awareness out as far as he could see, to the limit of the yard edge or his eyes’ vision, whichever came first. Life everywhere, from the bacteria and the worms in the dirt to the weedy jungle overrunning every square inch of the yard.

They’d have to replace the worms, when he was done. If Max was going to get all the seeds, he’d have to get everything within the top six inches of the soil. He could leave the bacteria alone – they were small enough that they couldn’t be anything else, and soil needed bacteria to rot the things he was going to kill – but worms were, unfortunately, indistinguishable from small plant shoots, and the garden wouldn’t do well once the worms were all dead.

He stood in the middle of the area he’d mentally bounded, and pulled life energy from it.

Most of the plants slumped immediately. The pokeweed, which wasn’t exactly woody but was easily the thickest non-woody stem Max was familiar with, stood up for a while even as its leaves shriveled, but eventually collapsed on itself. The woody vines and the overgrown shrubs lost their leaves, pulling the water out of any extremity they had in a doomed effort to save themselves. Plants interpreted the pulling of their life force as dehydration, probably because they weren’t evolved to experience this kind of death from any other force.

When he was done… there were still woody sticks and vines and leafless shrubbery everywhere, but everything green was gone, slumped to the ground.

With the clippers, he began cutting himself a path through some raspberry plants that had gotten way out of control, moving toward the side of the house. Once he was far in enough that he could see an area of the yard he hadn’t been able to see before, he did the same thing. Set the range, then pull the life.

It was very important to Max that he could physically see the area he was killing. He could sense life, and its approximate size, so things like the time some absolute shithead had left a child playing in the basement weren’t a real danger for him. He’d notice something as large as a child right away, and had, that time. (He couldn’t prove that said shithead had wanted him to kill the kid so they could sue his insurance for wrongful death, but at the very least the act had been neglectful enough that he’d seen the kid taken away and given to a foster family, and he’d testified at the hearing that had terminated the asshole’s custody. The kid had deserved better.) But kittens, puppies, songbirds, other creatures like that… life came in sizes, for him, and he couldn’t tell the difference between a mouse and a hummingbird, aside from the fact that hummingbirds didn’t stay still as often as mice did and were usually found higher than mice (not always, though… mice climbed on things.) So outside, where most living things were just minding their own business and not bothering the humans, he wanted to be able to see what he was killing.

Back out of where he was, head up to the porch, over to its side where he could see the other side of the yard. Set the range, pull the life. He included part of the house itself in his sweep this time, killing infestations of insects and an absurdly high number of rats and mice. What the hell had been wrong with that guy, that he’d let his disabled wife live in this shithole without doing anything to maintain it or keep the pests under control? Max got the concept of procrastination – the dishes in his own sink hadn’t been done for a week, he just kept killing the fruit flies and mold rather than actually washing them because he hadn’t run out of dishes yet – but this was appalling. He really didn’t want to go in the house, and from what he could see through the windows of the piles of clutter everywhere, the house plainly didn’t want him to go in, either. Hopefully he’d be able to get the place fully sterilized without having to enter.

The whole job took two hours. It was easily the longest a yard this size had ever taken him. By the time he was done, he was twitching with restless energy. The life went somewhere when he took it – it went into _him._ Max was in his thirties, but physically looked and felt like a man barely out of college; he grew facial hair just so people would take him seriously as a business owner. He’d been sick exactly once since he’d developed his power, mainly because he’d been binge drinking a lot at the time, and apparently that suppressed his immune system no matter how much life force he was brimming with. Max used to know a guy whose power allowed him to siphon off the excess life energy, which he used to pay Max for since he could use it to help sick people for cash, but someone had shot the dude last year and Max hadn’t found anyone else with a similar power set yet.

So here was the part where he wound up the job and went to the gym, because he had to do something to get rid of the energy, and neither of the exactly two girlfriends he’d had in his life had been able to keep up with him in bed when he was like this, so he needed other outlets.

As he left the place, Max looked back at the disaster of a yard. It actually looked significantly worse now – instead of green overgrowth covering everything, now it was sparser, but winter-brown and dry, nothing but lifeless shrubs and the tracery of woody vines still twined around everything despite being leafless and dead. But at least now, the landscapers would have an easier time of it; there’d be no difficulty telling the difference between legitimate, desired plants and weeds when all of them were dead, and dead plants were significantly easier to cut or remove.

He pulled out his cell phone as he headed for his car. “Hey there,” he said to the executor’s voice mail. “I finished the job. Go ahead and send the landscapers in before rats move into the vacuum I just left.”

Max really needed to find someone else who could siphon his excess energy, he thought. The money he’d just made was good, but it’d be better if he could do two or three jobs this size in a day without having to have a few hours in the gym to burn it off before draining anything else. Although, on the plus side, at least now he was really, really buff. Too bad that didn’t help much on the dating scene after he told girls about his power, but it wasn’t like he was going to lie.


	14. 16. Wild

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on this ficlet: https://alarawriting.tumblr.com/post/163200724583/a-hole-in-the-world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eventually these ficlets about different people and the hole in the world will weave together into a book. I hope. I have faith.

There is a hole in the world.

You went to Iowa, you bought your ticket, you stood on a very long line, and you went through the hole. That was five years ago.

They say humans can’t colonize this world. Something about it overtaxes their systems, fills them with adrenaline – fear, anger, excitement. It’s an incredible thrill to be here, breathing the air of an alien world. It looks so much like Earth, all in greens and blues, with plants that aren’t Earth plants but look like they _could_ be… but then there’s that sky with the giant green planet that plainly is not the moon. People who aren’t avid star watchers can’t tell that the stars are all wrong and people who aren’t botanists can’t tell that the plants never grew on Earth, but _everyone_ can tell that that thing isn’t the moon. The one constant of existence that for untold millennia has bound all humanity, that all humans see the same moon… and now, it’s no longer constant.

The atmosphere has more oxygen, substantially more – a mixture of 30% rather than 22%. No one is quite sure what the long-range effects of that are going to be. Some thought the overly oxygenated atmosphere was responsible for people’s restless energy, high arousal and inability to sleep, but then it was pointed out that on Earth, people who sleep with extra oxygen sleep better and deeper. It’s impossible to sleep well or for very long, here in the alien, untouched forests.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.

You never slept well on Earth. Everywhere you went, you felt like people were looking at you, judging you, and that most of them were out to get you. Your therapist told you it was an irrational fear. Your psychiatrist prescribed anti-anxiety medications. The therapeutic techniques you were taught felt like lies – of _course_ one of Them would tell you that there’s nothing to worry about and there’s no one after you. Intellectually you know it’s a mental illness, you know no one cares about you _that_ much, that they’re far more worried about what they look like to others than what you look like to them. But it doesn’t feel real. And the meds make you sleepy, and being sleepy in public terrifies you, so they really don’t do much for the anxiety in the end. Maybe they ease some of what you’d have normally felt, but at the cost of making you feel more of it.

Now here you are in a wilderness where no man has ever trod before you. There hasn’t been anything like this on the planet Earth in 10,000 years; the wilderness that invading colonists encountered in Australia and the Americas was actually cultivated and controlled by the natives living there, just in ways that users of European techniques couldn’t recognize. No one has found evidence of human or even sapient life on this planet; there are big animals, giant insects and birds somewhat bigger than what you can find on Earth because the higher oxygen supports greater sizes, but there’s no _people_ here, not that anyone has been able to find. 

It took some trial and error to figure out what you could eat. The animals over here use levoproteins, same as on Earth, and a lot of their biological structure is similar to Earth animals. They’re edible. Insects the size of an Earth hummingbird turn out to have plenty of juicy meat inside if you roast them. The plants were harder; many of them are poisonous. You had to go back home several times to update your tablet’s database with all the new plants that had been identified as edible, medicinal, poisonous or neutral. And then you had to make some money to support the next trip back over, quickly before nature took back everything you’d built, so you’d sell new specimens you’d found, bring dead insects and other animals to the biologists who studied the new world.

Eventually you figured out that if you got a company to pay you to take rubes on a tour of the tamer parts of the wilderness, the areas where humans had made inroads, and you did it within a three day walk of your own patch of the middle of nowhere, you just didn’t have to make a return trip. They’d pay _you_ to go over rather than you spending your money, and then you wouldn’t come back when the rubes headed back a day later. It bothered you, because it meant that someone knew you could live here, someone out there knew you were able to sleep in peace on the world that makes everyone too excited to sleep, and you started to fear returning. What if they grab you as soon as you come back and do experiments to figure out how it is you do it? There’s so much of this world that the corporations would love to exploit, but they can’t as long as no one can stay here more than a few days without suffering from sleep deprivation or stress effects. You might be the key to billions of dollars for those assholes.

So you gave it up, finally. No more updates for the tablet. You can only test for poisons the hard way; trap animals, feed them the questionable substance, and then if they don’t die, consume tiny quantities yourself. You know perfectly well that even on Earth, poisons don’t always cross species; a nice chocolate bar, a snack for you, could kill a dog. And these are alien animals, eating alien plants they’re evolved alongside of. One of these days, one of the things you test is going to poison you, and you’ll die out here in the wild, and it might be a hundred years before any human being finds your bones.

That’s all right. That’d be a good way to die.

See, you know the animals are watching you, but you know _why_, and you know what they see. Prey are seeing a potential predator. Predators are seeing possible prey who seems to be too tough to risk tangling with. Everything here could potentially kill you, but you know why it would happen if it did, and you know how to protect yourself. There’s nothing surreptitious, nothing clandestine, about the wild. The worst you’ll find is animals pretending to be different animals, or maybe plants. Or a venomous animal, but you’re very, very careful whenever you have to handle a creature you haven’t seen before.

In the years you’ve been doing this, you’ve lugged over enough well-made tools from Earth that you were able to build yourself a cabin, out here in the wild. You’re up high enough that even if someone sees the smoke from your firepit, you’ll see them before they see you, and you pull the furs you tanned yourself closed over your windows and tie them shut every night before lighting your solar-powered lanterns… which won’t last forever, but you’ve been experimenting with different materials to make candles out of. You let the paths you took to get here overgrow, knowing that you and your machete can always hack a path back out if you need to get out of here, but that the rubes who expect trails to be made for them will never come up here and get you.

You’re wide awake and full of restless energy every day, just like every other human who comes to this planet. But when it’s nighttime, and you know there are no humans within miles of your home, and that you know all the risks facing you in the nighttime and what to do if they come to pass, and that you’ve prepared for any eventuality that might occur in a wilderness without people… then you sleep more peacefully than you ever have in your life.


	15. 15. Legend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fic about supervillains, not set in the Proxima universe. Diamond Bitch interviews for a hench position with the legendary Professor Cat Schroedinger. The position is not what she expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will eventually be expanded into a full short story or novella.

I probably should have refused the job as soon as she told me I was going to have to change my name, but it was Cat Schrödinger, man. What hench in her right mind wouldn’t give her left tit to work for _her?_

“I can’t have you calling yourself Diamond Bitch,” she said. “Can you go by Diamond, instead?”

“It’s a play on words,” I argued. “You know. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. So I’m a Diamond Bitch. What’s wrong with that? I mean, we’re _villains._ I don’t have to have some kind of hero-code-compliant name.”

“Bitch is a misogynistic slur and it offends me.” She looked up at me through thick glasses like I was a specimen she was analyzing. It made me uncomfortable. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“I… guess I can call myself Diamond,” I said. “Doesn’t sound really original, though. I mean, there are girls in trailer parks who are _named_ Diamond on their birth certificate.”

“If you’d like to call yourself Diamond Dog, I can accept that.”

Yeah, no. Maybe Cat Schrödinger was offended by the word bitch, but I thought it had a lot more chops than dog. A dog is loyal and kinda dumb and will follow you everywhere wagging her tail. A bitch will bite you if you fuck with her. “Nah, I’ll stick with Diamond, I guess.” I leaned back on the wall, adopting my “cool” pose. I like my cool pose. I’ve practiced it in the mirror a lot. “So, what’s the job? You got something spectacular planned for your coming back to the game? Or is it just general henching?”

“Neither,” Dr. Schrödinger said. “I need a bodyguard—”

“Okay, that’s cool, I can bodyguard—”

“—for my kids. Someone who can keep them safe while I go back into the ‘game’, as you put it.”

That was the point where I should have _definitely_ refused the job.

***

So if you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, or you’re avoiding learning anything about the cape community the way I avoid learning about the Kardashians, maybe you’ve never heard of Cat Schrödinger. In the Umbra, though, she’s a legend. Mad scientist type, you know the kind. Most female mad scientists have to go out of their way to look young and pretty and wear makeup to be taken seriously as a _villain,_ because people expect mains who are women to be sexy or else how dangerous can they possibly be? Henches like me get to be hard and butch, but mains gotta be sexy, whichever side they’re on. But Schrödinger broke that mold. She was overweight, she had frizzy hair, she wore glasses – not sexy, stylish ones either, she wore the kind that get nerds with pocket protectors beaten up – didn’t wear makeup, stared right through people, wasn’t suave or sexy… just incredibly smart and competent. Always six steps ahead of the heewees (excuse me, “heroes”… little Umbra slang, there). She left innocent people alone, for the most part, and went after big corporations, with knockout gas and teleportation rays to take out the security guards instead of killing them. She only engaged with the heewees, like, five times directly, plus her henches took on some sidekicks a few times, but each time she got away without getting hit, captured, or tracked. Despite the fact that she appeared to be a human of only average combat skill and no superpowers.

No one ever captured her, or learned her real name or where she lived. And then she disappeared, for sixteen years.

So when I heard she was looking for a hench, I was there with bells on. She had me come to a nice, fancy, rich-person house, which I thought was a little weird for a supervillain’s lair, and then on the inside it turned out to be decorated like a fancy rich-person house, which was pretty surprising but I figured, maybe the place is a cover. We didn’t get very far in the interview in all when she told me that she’d already investigated me and I was perfect for the job, and then she told me I had to change my name, and the rest you know.

“You want me to be a fucking _babysitter?_”

“Language!”

“Are you Cat Schrödinger or are you a Sunday school teacher?”

“I am a _mother_,” she snapped. “And you are going to be taking care of my children, so watch your language.”

“I didn’t come here to take a job being a babysitter, I came to hench for one of the world’s top Umbra mains.”

“And that’s what you’d be doing. I need a bodyguard for my kids. You think being my bodyguard is acceptable, but being a bodyguard for my children isn’t?”

I glared down at her. “I don’t _do_ kids.”

“Perhaps you misunderstand. I don’t need a nanny to read Goodnight Moon to my children and sing them clean-up songs and cut out paper dolls with them. I need a _bodyguard._ The children are old enough that they can take care of themselves, when we take my enemies out of the equation. They need a hench for a bodyguard because they might come under attack from capes – heroes, or other Umbrals.”

My eyes narrowed. “You said you were looking for a woman to hench for you.”

“That’s right.”

“So what the fuck? You pick me because girls are better at taking care of kids?” I sneered at her.

Her eyes stared right through me, like I was nothing, like I wasn’t even there. “Statistically men are much more likely to be rapists. My husband’s in Europe. I don’t want a strange man in my house.”

“You have a _husband?_”

“I didn’t get my kids through parthenogenesis, no.”

“Yeah, but I figured… someone like you, doesn’t _need_ to buy into society’s bullshit…”

“I didn’t. I met a man I liked. I decided I would rather share a life with him than take over the world. Then he decided to go on a business trip for three weeks without me. Three weeks is long enough to get a plan into action.”

“He doesn’t know you’re Umbral, does he?”

“No, and he’s not going to… not unless I’ve got the world to give him on a platter.”

I thought about having a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, who wanted to give me the world on a platter, and I shivered just a little. I never had anyone care about me like that. Not that I wanted Professor Schrödinger or something, she was way too old for me. But to work for someone who was that passionate about what she did – who’d give up being a cape for the person she loved, who’d throw everything she had into taking the world so she could give it to that person…?

“I… guess I could at least meet the kids, see if I want to do it.”

She nodded. “They’re upstairs. I’ll show you.”

I probably should have backed out. Like I said. I’m _not_ good with kids.

But it wouldn’t exactly be the first dumbass move I’ve made in my life.


	16. 17. Ornament

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on the characters and situations in "April's Dream House", which I described in https://alarawriting.tumblr.com/post/174289659708/aprils-dream-house, but here's a short summary. Somewhere, a very twisted little girl and her friends are playing with dolls, and the result is an adult comedy that's like what if Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken, and Tuca and Bertie got into a horrible transporter accident. April, the world's most famous fashion doll, can't maintain the mortgage on her Dream House after being fired from over 100 careers she's had in her life because she's a mega-bitch, so she has had to rent out to other dolls. Parodies "Bratz", "Monster High", "My Little Pony", "Hello Kitty", and other stuff. This installment is the Special Christmas Episode, or at least the first part of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is no respectful way to convey this in writing, but Kelly/Kerry Kitty has a very strong Japanese accent. Also, Lovey has the kind of voice that makes Eeyore suggest to her she might want to seek therapy.
> 
> This was originally envisioned as a cartoon, with voice acting and the ability to visually see the ridiculousness of the mismatched scale on some of the toys, and it shows.

“Where is my _fucking_ box of Christmas ornaments?”

April was busily tossing everything Catrina owned down the stairs from the attic garret where she lived. “April! What the fuck! That’s my stuff!” Catrina yelled.

“Yeah, your stuff that you couldn’t bother to keep neatly like I _told_ you to, and this is seriously a health code hazard,” April said. “But more importantly, you’re living in the room I put my Christmas ornaments in, last January, and I need to find them.”

“You keep tossing my stuff around like that and I’ll kill you, mraow!”

“It’s _my house_, bitch, and you don’t pay anywhere near a fair rate for the rent.” April moved on to the back of the attic, where no one lived. “Ugh, this place is a nightmare.”

Catrina came up into the attic. “Well, whose fault is that, meow? All that’s _your_ mess.”

Behind her, Kelly stuck her oversized head up. “I think Marie Kondo needs to come to this house,” she said. “April-san, I can’t imagine that _any_ of that stuff back there sparks joy.”

“Hey! What are you doing in my room? Sssss!” Catrina postured at Kerry Kitty with her claws out. “No other cats allowed, this is my territory!”

“Oh, then you don’t want me to bring up the things April dropped,” Kelly said. “Okay.” Her large paws opened and dropped the pile of clothing she’d been carrying.

“Wait, no!”

“Oh, so you _do_ want me to help you bring up the clothes,” Kerry said. “Please make up your mind.”

“AHA!” April brandished the box of ornaments. “Found you, you little motherfuckers!”

“April-san, your language. Emily might hear you!”

“Emily is probably eating the Christmas tree,” April shot back. “Make way, coming through, lady with large box here!”

Kelly jumped off the attic stairs with as much grace as a 5-foot tall bipedal cat with a giant head could achieve. Catrina dodged and rolled onto her own bed, or what was left of it after April had dragged it around looking for the ornament box. April, six foot two and model-slim with a frankly impossible body, toted the large box over to the attic stairs, balancing it on her shoulders, and then tossed it down, following that with a graceful jump to the floor herself. “Everybody gather round!” she shouted in her most saccharine voice. “It’s time for Christmas decorating!”

“Doctor Zapp isn’t here,” Lovey said in her sad, slow voice. “Don’t you think we should ask him to come upstairs?”

“Pfft, no. That nerd never wants to come upstairs. Besides, what do you care? He’s scared of dogs.”

“I’m not a big dog,” Lovey said, despite the fact that she was easily twice the size of anyone else in the house. “Anyway, he’s only scared of bad dogs. I’m a good dog.”

“Goo dug,” Emily Egg agreed, thick baby fingers twined in the puppy’s fur. “Wuvvy goo dug.”

“Yes, I’m sure you said something, but no one cares what,” April said. “_Sheonte! Cherry!_ We’re doing Christmas decorations!”

“We don’t celebrate Christmas in Ponyland, and I really don’t appreciate you trying to push your human customs on me,” Cherry yelled back.

“Fuck, no, you’re a children’s cartoon. What do they do for your holiday specials? I know you’ve got _something_ that looks just like Christmas. Get your horse’s ass out here so I don’t need to keep yelling.”

Sullenly Cherry Blossom plodded out of her room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“On Best Pony Friends. You’ve got to have some kind of Christmas-like holiday for the holiday specials.”

“We have the Festival of Friendship… I guess it’s kind of like Christmas. We give our friends gifts, and hang up ornaments, and make snowponies, and sing carols—”

“So what you’re saying is, it’s _exactly_ like Christmas.”

“Minus the overcommercialization and people trampling each other to get the last copy of a cheap mass-manufactured toy, yeah, I guess.”

Kerry volunteered, “I used to be on the air right before Best Pony Friends. Their Christmas is very nice-looking.”

“It’s the Festival of Friendship! Not Christmas!”

“You just keep telling yourself that,” April said. “_SHE-ON-TE!_ We are all waiting on you!”

“A Diva is never rushed,” Sheonte yelled from her bedroom. “Beauty and style like this takes _effort._”

“Come on, bitch, they threw you out of the Divazz because you tried to kill Vivi and your ex.”

“They were fucking! In _my bedroom!_ You’d have tried to kill them too.”

“I don’t think the language in this house is a very good example for Emily,” Lovey complained.

“I wouldn’t have tried to kill them too because that would never happen to me because _Chad_ is a real gentleman who would never cheat on me,” April said.

“Yeah, too bad you such a ho you gotta cheat on _him._” Sheonte finally made her appearance, strutting into the room like she owned it. Her Afro was lightly sprinkled with pale glitter on the edges to create an effect much like she’d just been walking in light snow, and she was dressed stylishly with 14-inch stiletto heels, a green velvet miniskirt, a white blouse that did not cover her multiply-pierced belly button, and a shimmering silver jacket. And many belts around her body that didn’t seem to actually do anything. And by “stylishly”, April meant “like a cheap whore.”

“Look, it’s not _my_ fault that Chad is _such_ a gentleman that he’s waiting until we get married. Saving yourself for marriage is a beautiful thing in a man, and I really appreciate his sacrifice! But I gotta get my pussy pounded by _someone_, and Mr. Vibrator can’t always do the job, you know?”

Lovey was covering Emily’s ears with her paws. “April! You can’t say things like that in front of Emily!”

“Oh, like she understands.” April walked up to Emily, smiling. The baby, who would be the same height as April if she could actually stand up, beamed up at her from her position on the floor. “Who’s such a stupid baby?” April said in the same cheerful tone that one would say “Who’s such a good dog?” to one’s good dog. “Yes, you are! You _are_ a stupid little baby!” Emily laughed and clapped.

“Can we get this over with?” Catrina asked. “April fucked up my entire room and I’m gonna have to spend the rest of the day fixing it, mraow.”

“Yes, we can get it going now, since I’m here,” Sheonte said. “April, where are the ornaments?”

“Right here,” April said, and opened the box with a flourish…

…to an assortment of brightly colored bits of shattered glass.

“Oh, shit,” April said.

“I think maybe you should not have thrown them down the stairs,” Kelly said.

“Bitch, you tear my room apart for _this?_” Catrina snarled. “These weren’t shit to begin with, meow, and then you went and shattered them to pieces on top of that?”

“Yeah, these ornaments were shit before you broke them,” Sheonte said. “What’d you do, get a truckload of shiny glass balls at Target?”

Emily began to cry. “Owwmens!” she wailed, which probably meant “ornaments” but sounded entirely too much like “omens”.

“We knew how to do a Christmas with the Weargirls,” Catrina said. “We used to go over Batrice’s mansion and decorate with lights and a ton of different ornaments, meow. Gorgeous stuff.”

“Yeah, well, feel free to go live with Batrice. Door’s that way,” April said.

Catrina made a face. “They’re vampires. They don’t have any windows, sss.”

“This is very sad,” Lovey said, her permanent sad-hound-dog face emphasizing the sadness. “I’m very sad.”

“Owwmens!”

“AwOOOO!”

“Oh, for the love of Christ _shut_ it, both of you. I know what to do.” April closed the box of ornaments. “To the Glitter Van! We’re gonna go to the Christmas store and buy ornaments!”

“Kissma tor?” Emily asked, cheering up right away.

“Oh! I love Christmas store! Let me get Christmas kimono on before we go!” Kerry said, and ran off before April could stop her.

“I’m not dressed for going out,” Catrina complained. “I need to try to find _something_ I can wear, meow, since you trashed my room!”

“Yeah, this is not a Christmas store look,” Sheonte said. “I’m gonna change into something better for going out.”

“This is California, it’s not like it’s cold,” April said.

“I didn’t say better clothes for cold weather, I said better clothes for going _out._ This shit’s okay for just hanging with you bitches, but if I’m gonna get _Seen_, I need to look my best.” She strutted back to her room.

“I don’t wear clothes,” Cherry Blossom said.

“Yeah, good for you.”

“But your mane looks like a stinking pile of dog doo. You need to go get brushed and get dressed yourself before you go out looking like that.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion, you nag.”

“That is a misogynist and ageist slur among my people and I’m going to post about your insensitivity on social media if you don’t apologize right now.”

“Apologize to this,” April said, giving Cherry the middle finger.

She sat down on her couch, defeated, as Cherry trotted away. “This is totally fucked up.”

“Don’t worry,” Lovey said, snuggling against April, trying to cheer her up by being a dog. “I’m sure you’ll be able to fix everything as soon as everyone gets ready and we can go to the ornament store.”

Lovey had been in this house long enough to know that “everyone gets ready” could take upward of 3 hours, and besides, April didn’t like dogs. She pushed Lovey away. “Easy for you to say.”

The door to the basement opened, and Doctor Zapp, dressed in his characteristic lab coat, goggles, and green shirt that he apparently never took off, stuck his tiny head out. “What’d I miss?”


	17. 23: Ancient

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pretty sure everyone can tell where this comes from, but for those who missed it, this is based on the song "Jolene" by Dolly Parton.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Darla called, limping across the living room to the front door. Goodness, who was ringing the front doorbell? She knew everyone in town, and they knew to knock at the kitchen door, even the Amazon package delivery people and the driver for the new Indian restaurant over in town. She’d barely been in the living room for a week, ever since she’d hosted the last monthly meeting of the book club.

She reached the door, unbolted the lock, and pulled it open. “Can I help--?”

And stopped, staring.

She should have pulled aside the curtain and looked through the window before opening the door – what she’d done hadn’t been very secure. But the person on the other side of the door wasn’t the kind of danger she could have called 911 about.

Waves of shining auburn hair, brilliant green eyes, pale, unfreckled skin… and no sign of age. At all. Forty-five years, and the woman on her porch looked exactly the same.

“Jolene…?” Darla whispered.

“I haven’t been called that in a while,” the woman said, with a beautiful smile that made you want to do anything to see it more often. “Can I come in, Darla?”

“Can I stop you?” Darla asked, intending it to come out sharp-tongued, but instead it sounded wondering, a genuine question.

The creature that had called herself Jolene forty-five years ago laughed like sweet bells. “Oh, my word, you certainly can,” she said. “I can’t do anything I’m not invited to do. I thought you knew that.”

Darla’s eyes narrowed. “Well, I don’t know whether it’s safe to let you in or not, but I won’t be unneighborly. Let me get the sweet tea, and I’ve got a plate of lemon bars, and we can sit together out on the porch and… um, catch up, if that’s what you’re here for.” To be honest she couldn’t imagine what Jolene wanted or why she was here. Had she come to try to seduce James? Did she know he’d been dead for six years?

“Thank you,” Jolene said. “I do appreciate it.”

***

In a few minutes, Darla was sitting with Jolene out on the porch. It was a beautiful fall day, the leaves in full multicolored blaze, maybe a _little_ more chilly than was best for sharing sweet iced tea and lemon bars on the porch, but she had her sweater on and Jolene… honestly probably didn’t feel the cold, Darla imagined.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Darla said, which was usually a polite platitude but this time was the exact truth.

“Did you expect me to?” Jolene smiled and tossed her head slightly, her hair, so perfectly matched to the fall colors all around them, flying prettily over her shoulder.

“Not really,” Darla said, “but to be honest, Jolene, I never expected to see you again. Are you here for James?”

Jolene shook her head. “I know perfectly well you wouldn’t allow me to see him, and it’s not why I’m here. But how is he? Did you get the life you were hoping to have, when I gave him back?”

Darla sipped her tea. “We had forty wonderful years together, nearabouts. Had three lovely, healthy kids. He died, six years back.”

“Oh.” Jolene seemed taken aback. “Oh, I forgot. That does happen to your folk, doesn’t it? I’m sorry to hear it. How did it happen?”

“His heart. It was quick, thank the Lord.” She shook her head. “That was an awful time, make no mistake. I felt like I couldn’t go on, like I just wanted to fold myself up and join him in his grave, but my friends and my children and grandchildren got me through with the help of the good Lord, and now? It’s never stopped aching, but it aches less. Not as hard, not as sharp.” She caught herself. Why was she telling Jolene all this?

“Was it worth it? When you and I talked, it sounded like you thought it would end your life if he was gone. Now you tell me, six years after he’s truly gone forever, it doesn’t matter so much?”

“It’s a different thing,” Darla said, her voice calm and patient, not stinging with anger like she wished she could safely do. “I’m old now. Humans… we die when we get old. It’s not something I’m happy about, but it’s the way it is and there’s no changing it, so no sense getting too upset. And… I had forty years with him. When you tried to take him from me, we weren’t even married yet. We’d been dating for a year. If you took him from me, I didn’t know if I’d ever find another man to love.”

“In my experience, when young women say they’ll never love again if their man leaves them, and then he leaves them… it turns out they were wrong. They find love again. Almost all the time.”

“I suppose you’ve got quite a lot of experience with taking other women’s men,” Darla said, and this time the bitterness couldn’t be kept out of her voice.

“A lot,” Jolene agreed, seeming unoffended at Darla’s tone.

“Then why didn’t you? Why did you believe me, and leave, and let me have James?” _And why are you here now?_

Jolene took a few moments to apparently think about the question before answering. “You showed me respect. Deference. You praised my beauty and acknowledged my superiority, and then you begged for my mercy.” She shook her head slowly. “In five hundred years, no one else has done that. The men try to kill me, and the women spit on me and call me names, as if that’s going to get their lovers back.”

“The men? You try to take men’s lovers too?”

“I don’t _try_, Darla, honey, I succeed.” She leaned forward slightly. “Your folk call us demons, but we’ve got nothing to do with Heaven or Hell. We live in this world and no other. But we feed on love. We make our prey love us and then we drain them dry.” Jolene leaned back and took a sip of the tea Darla had given her. “_You’d_ probably have loved again, but James wouldn’t have.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You just asked,” Jolene said in a very reasonable tone. “You call us incubi and succubi, for male and female ones, but all of us have the ability to be whatever a human we want to love us wants. I can be a man, and take a woman away with me and leave her husband broken-hearted and swearing to kill me, or I can be a woman, and take a man.” She shrugged. “Or, you know, men and men, women and women. Humans are complicated. I led a fellow who loved little boys once to his death by looking like a beautiful boy.”

“I can’t say I can hold that one against you.” Darla sipped the tea. “But the others? Good, God-fearing men and women, and you seduced them and led them to ruin, and left their lovers with broken hearts in your wake? That was a terrible thing to do. Why are you here bragging about it to me?”

“Because—because, for the first time in my existence…” Jolene took a deep breath. “I’m not bragging, Darla. I’m being honest. I feed on the love those poor souls feel for me, but it’s never true love. Never anything deep and lasting, like what you had with James and your forty-five years. I can’t help what I need to eat, but for the first time, I…”

“If you’ve got something to say, I think you’d best say it.”

Jolene leaned forward across the table and put her hand on Darla’s. Darla was too shocked to pull away. “Forty-five years and I still remember you,” Jolene said. “Do you think I remember any of the others? The ones who screamed at me, who called me slurs or threatened to kill me, or even tried it? But I remember you. _You_ knew what I was. You were afraid. But you spoke with respect, and you didn’t try to use a cross to banish me, or harm me, and you didn’t speak to me as if I was an evil demon. You told me I was beautiful, and that you knew I could best you when it came to winning your man. And you asked for my mercy, as if you thought I was a creature that had any, and I – I found that I couldn’t _not_ give it to you, once you had asked. No one has ever asked before.”

“It’s hard, for humans to admit weakness to someone who threatens them,” Darla admitted. “It’s very hard. But still. In five hundred years, I was the only one?”

“Yes.” Jolene’s eyes were fixed on hers. “Darla, I – I want… I can’t stop thinking about you. I can’t stop thinking how brave you were to challenge me for the one you loved, and… no one has ever loved me like that. My lovers are food. I don’t feel anything for them, and it’s just my magic and my techniques that make them love me, and if I let them go they forget all about me. Did James ever speak of me again?”

“No,” Darla said. “Never.”

“I want… to court you.”

That made Darla try to stand up, with shock, but her bad leg wouldn’t hold her and she had to sit down again immediately. “You _what?_”

“I know. You think I’m a monster, and by some lights, I reckon I am. But I’m a monster you treated with more respect and kindness than any other human who wasn’t under my spell has ever shown me. And I want to know… what it’s like to _feel_ love, not just to eat it. I want to know what it’s like to have a mutual relationship rather than just being a predator.”

“All this, because I was respectful to you? My Ma would have washed out my mouth with soap for treating any person with disrespect. I can’t be the only one.”

“You’re the only one I’ve met.”

Darla managed to get to her feet. “How could this possibly be a thing? You admitted you seduce women as well as men. How can I trust you not to be trying to seduce me just to feed on me?”

“I can’t lie, Darla.” She laughed, a sound like a summer day. “You know what kind of being I am, but you think I can lie to you?”

“How do you entrap your men if you can’t lie?”

“Oh, I can mislead, I can bluff. Leave things out. Let them hear what they want to hear. Humans are good at that. I say something vague and they decide they’re sure they know what it means. None of that’s a lie, not truly. What I can’t do is look a person in the face, like I am, and say to them plain words, and have those words be a lie. So I’m saying this to you: I’ll never hurt you on purpose again. I don’t want to feed from you, and I won’t. I want to court you, if you’ll have me, and I hope I can learn what it feels like to love, or to be truly loved, not for magic or beauty but for myself.”

“And if I say no, I’m not interested?”

“It’d depend on why. If you say to me, I can only love a man, well, I can be a man for you. If you say to me, I can’t love you no matter what you look like… well, if I wanted to make someone love me, there’s a whole world out there I could do that to. From you, I only want it if it’s real, and if it can’t be, I’ll leave here and never darken your door again.”

“I’m flattered by all this, but why me? I’m just an ordinary woman.”

“In five hundred years I’d never met a person like you, man or woman.”

“I’m old. I’m going to die before too long – hopefully I’ve got a good twenty, thirty years left in me, but I can’t reasonably expect more, and you’re ancient. You’ll go on, maybe not forever, but a long, long time after I’m gone.”

“That’s my fault. Took me forty-five years to swallow my pride and realize that ever since I’ve met you, I’ve longed to know you better than I’ve known any other human. Never met anyone like you in the time since we met, either, so it’s not like I have choices, and the only thing that matters to me about your age is that it’ll end you sooner than I’m ready to lose you, but if I don’t court you and try to win your love now, then I’ve lost you forever anyhow. Beauty’s my weapon; I don’t care for it for myself, one way or the other.”

“And if I said to you, only if you swear to me that you’ll never take an innocent man or woman away from the one they love again? And never prey on an innocent who doesn’t already have a love, either?”

Jolene frowned, a beautiful little pout that should have made her look petulant, but didn’t. “I have to eat,” she said.

“Take men who beat their wives and women who are even worse users than you, women who toy with men for fun rather than needing to eat to live. You said you could go after men with sick intentions toward little boys and girls. Take them. I don’t begrudge you your food if you prey on the predators of humanity who are human themselves and don’t have the excuse that it’s their nature like it is yours.”

“I could do that.”

“For the rest of your existence. Even after I’m dead. I can’t love someone who I know will destroy innocent lives after I’m gone.”

Jolene raised her eyebrows. “You are demanding.”

“You said you wanted to court me because I’m the only one who ever showed you respect and courtesy. If I’m the only one and I’m what you want, then pay my price. You can walk away any time you like.”

“And if I swear to feed only on humans who prey on other humans, then you’ll love me?”

“No. Then you can court me, and try to win my love the human way. I don’t love you, Jolene; I don’t even know you. All you ever were to me was a woman-shaped… being… to be feared, because you were trying to take my man from me. But you didn’t do it, in the end. You gave me back my happiness. I think maybe you _could_ be a creature I could love, from what very little I know about you, because you’re honorable and you showed mercy to me.” And she was beautiful. Darla swallowed. That part shouldn’t matter; Jolene herself had admitted she could look like anything, and beauty was only a weapon to her. But it didn’t change the facts. When she had bared her heart to Jolene and begged her to show mercy, all those years ago, she’d been able to do it in part because she’d been half infatuated with the succubus herself. If it hadn’t been for the Sight she’d inherited from her grandma, she might never have known what Jolene was, and she might herself have been lost, falling helplessly in love with the predator stalking her James. Even knowing what she was, her unearthly beauty made Darla’s breath catch in her throat.

It was Jolene’s nature. People _wanted_ her for a friend, people wanted her to think highly of them. Anyone who loved women could fall under their spell, and Darla had loved James passionately her whole life but it hadn’t changed her ability to desire women as well. She’d been faithful, but James was dead, and wouldn’t begrudge her finding someone else now.

If Jolene was lying, and lying about her ability to lie, then, Darla thought, she was already lost. Best to proceed as if Jolene was telling the truth. She was sixty-five years old; she didn’t have much left to lose, if Jolene betrayed her, if she was nothing but a predator and she was able and willing to lie. But if Jolene was truthful…

“I wouldn’t mind it, you courting me. We could date. See if you still like me when you know me better. See if I like the person you are when you’re not a predator hunting game. But you’d have to swear to me that you’ll harm none of my family and that you won’t again feed on an innocent person, that you’ll take your prey only from the humans who hurt other humans.”

“I can swear that.”

That was a weasel expression, something a person who wouldn’t lie might say to mislead. “Then do it. Swear it now.”

Jolene laughed again. “Of course. I swear that whether or not you let me court you, and whether or not we form a relationship, I won’t harm you or any of your kin or anyone you care for, deliberately, and I’ll try my best not to cause harm by accident. I swear that whether or not you let me court you, and whether or not we form a relationship, from this day forth I’ll take my prey only from the men and women who prey on their fellow humans. Does that suit you?”

“I didn’t tell you you had to say ‘whether or not I let you court me’.”

“I know, but you should have. I added it because I didn’t want you to pretend to love me just to keep me from harming the humans you call innocent. I told you, I mean to win your heart the human way, and that means I can’t be offering you gifts if you take me but not if you don’t; I don’t want you to love me for the gifts I give, or to pretend to love me to keep away the threats I can make. I want you to be free to choose as you will.”

Darla let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “You’re right, I should have. I didn’t think of it. Thank you for adding that.” If the being calling herself Jolene could be that honorable, maybe this could work. “I agree, then. I won’t promise you love, but I’ll promise you a few dates and we’ll see where it takes us from there.”

“Then what would you like? Dinner? A movie? All I know is what the men and women I’ve hunted expected from me, or expected me to do.”

“Can you eat real food?”

“I’m drinking your tea, aren’t I?” She smiled. “I don’t much care for lemons, and I apologize. But yes, I eat human food and I enjoy it. I can’t cook it particularly well, though; never needed to. People under my spell thought anything I gave them was wonderful.”

“Well, then. You come over tonight around 6 o’clock, and I’ll make us a meal and teach you how to cook it, and we can eat, and talk. How does that sound to _you_, for a first date?”

Jolene’s eyes were bright. “I would love that, Darla. I’ll be back tonight.”


	18. 13: Ash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More from the universe of "No Drama". I decided to tell this particular story from the third person POV of John's photographer partner -- the novel itself is in first person, but a look at what humans who know John think of him seemed like a good idea.

Lailah arrived at the bar as quickly as she could, panting slightly. “John! What’s the emergency?”

“There’s no emergency,” her partner, John Deer, assured her, slurring slightly. He had a glass of bourbon in front of him, no ice, mostly empty. The fact that he was slurring, and the fact that he had called her insisting that it was an emergency and she needed to meet him at Gaetano’s right away and now he was claiming there was no emergency, suggested that it was not his first one, or likely, even his third.

“You said there was an emergency,” she snapped. She hated bar stools. She hated absurdly tall men who sat on bar stools and then looked down at her because she was very short and not on a bar stool. “Tell me now why I don’t just walk the hell out of here.”

“Because Heph was busy and Mike’s in his studio and he won’t let me call,” John said, “and it’s a funeral, so I need someone to drink with.” He grinned as if what he had just said was the most reasonable thing possible.

Lailah sighed and put her camera bag on the bar. “Buy me something, then,” she said. “Something light if you expect me to drive your ass home when you’re done.”

“Bartender!”

Despite the fact that the bar was fairly full, the bartender came over to him almost immediately. John had a weird magnetism that made everyone pay more attention to him when he wanted attention, ignore him when he wanted to be ignored, and assume he belonged anywhere he happened to be. Lailah was pretty sure the personal magnetism thing was dependent on the fact that he was a white dude – she couldn’t imagine a world where that trick would work for a black woman – but it went a lot farther than just being a charismatic and decent-looking white dude could explain; he’d gotten her into the White House once. Any time anyone had questioned what she was doing there, he’d said, “She’s with me.” No one had ever asked _him_ what he was doing there.

“What’ll you have?”

“A hard cider for the lady, and another bourbon for me.”

The bartender nodded and bustled away. “How many of those have you had?” Lailah asked.

“Not enough yet.”

She sighed, mentally shrugging. She wasn’t his mom. If he wanted to drink himself stupid, that was his problem. She’d nurse her one cider, watch over him to make sure he didn’t do anything egregiously dumb, and drive him home when he was done, or when she was sick of putting up with him, whichever came first. She _liked_ John, but he could be an amazing ass sometimes.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked. “Did we get a contract? Or did one fall through?”

“Neither,” he said, and waved at the front windows of the bar. “You can’t see it from here. I mean, you could see the star, maybe, if there was a lot less light outside and it was the right season or you were in the right place, and it’d help to have a telescope, but the point is. The _point_ is. You can’t see the planet. It’s two hundred fifty-seven light years away from Earth, right now.”

“I’m sure that seems really relevant to you in your current state, but—”

“No. Listen. They killed themselves. You’d be seeing it right now if you could see it. Two hundred fifty-seven years ago they burned their entire planet to ash. There were single-celled organisms left alive, and some of their equivalent of insects. You know every single planet with multi-cellular life has something like a cockroach, right?”

“I’m sure it does,” Lailah said, wondering if a hard cider was going to be enough to get her through this.

John was weird. Possibly not all there, mentally. He was brilliant, he was amazing at persuading people to do anything – including answer his questions, which for a journalist was an incredible talent – he saw connections no one else could see, and he spoke so many languages, Lailah hadn’t yet been somewhere that John wasn’t fluent in the local speech. For a photojournalist, he was a great partner to have, and if she ever won a Pulitzer it would probably be for photos he got her in place to be able to take. But he was _weird_.

If he’d been frequently drunk, like he was tonight; if he’d sexually harassed her, or anyone else; if he was on illegal drugs… she wouldn’t have liked any of those things, and the sexual harassment thing would have been a deal-breaker for their partnership, but she knew a _lot_ of journos with one or many of those particular flaws. Those, she would have understood. But John… occasionally talked about historical events as if he’d been there, frequently made off-hand references to other planets and then pretended he hadn’t, and often referred to humanity as “you” instead of “us.” She strongly suspected he was delusional, and overly influenced by science fiction.

Most of the time he stayed professional about it; an occasional slip, and then a bullshit excuse why he’d said it, an outright denial that he’d said it, or completely ignoring her questions, and moving on. She suspected that tonight wasn’t going to be one of those times.

“Nothing left,” he said, and took his new glass from the bartender, downing about half of it. Lailah winced. Her cider was cold, and tasty, and desperately needed with John turning weird up to 11.

“Okay, so let’s say for the sake of argument that I accept this. There’s a planet 257 light years away and they destroyed themselves. Why do I care? Why do you care?”

He blinked at her. “Because!”

“I need a little more than that to go on. Because why?”

“Don’t you _care?_ They were people. Like you’re people. Like—” he waved his left arm to encompass the room, and narrowly avoided smacking the guy next to him – “this whole planet. All the creatures on it. Now imagine they’re gone. Ashes. Dead. Don’t you think it _matters?_”

“It matters while we’re dying, I guess,” Lailah said. “But after we’re dead, who’ll be there to know or care?”

“I will!”

“Right, because you’re immune to nukes. I should’ve figured.”

“I am,” John said, pointing at her as if he was imparting vital information, or dressing down an unruly student. “But that’s not the _point_.”

“I’m not sure what the point is…”

“They’re dead!” John snapped, and slid off his chair, staggering toward the door. Cursing quietly, since she expected her cider wouldn’t still be there when she returned, Lailah grabbed her camera bag and followed him.

Directly outside the bar, John pointed at the sky. “They were just like you. Six legs instead of four, radial symmetry instead of bilateral. They had three eyes, three vibrating membranes for picking up sound. Made noises like parrots do, they could imitate almost any sound they heard. They blew fiberglass into tapestries. Thick skin, it didn’t make them itch. Blanketed their world with fiber optics to communicate with each other. Laid eggs. The females used to go out and get food while the males cradled the eggs and kept them warm, but they’d developed sexual equality so both parents took turns cradling the eggs.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“Because they’re dead. I tried to help them and it turned into a holy war and that was the last thing it should have been and I didn’t see the danger in time and then they hit the buttons and they blew it all up. You think nukes are bad. They had antimatter. It was going to be clean, pure energy, they were using the power of the sun to make the stuff, in space. Their sun was bigger than yours. Still is, the sun’s still there. Planet too. It’s the life that’s gone. So much ash.”

Lailah shook her head. This was plainly a mental illness. John was seriously distressed by the imaginary death of his imaginary planet. But it wasn’t going to do any good to tell him it was imaginary if he was delusional. Best for him if she played along. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know what they were going to do.”

“But I should’ve! It was my _job!_ I was… I was supposed to be guiding them. Helping them. It was going to prove to the Convocation that my way would work. Strong intervention policy, step in and help them reach the eschaton, right? But they never will because I fucked it up and they’re all dead.” He looked around himself. “I’m not drunk enough.”

“I think maybe you are,” Lailah said.

“Then why hasn’t it _stopped?_ I look up in the sky and I know, if I had a powerful enough telescope, I could see it now. I could see them dying right now. Today’s the day. Two hundred fifty-seven light years, three light months, twenty-two light days. I can see it but I can’t change it. It’s in my past, you can’t break causality like that. You can go back but you can’t change things. Whatever happened, always happened, or things break. Worse things than one planet. But they were my charges and they’re dead and it’s my fault.”

“And you think you can drink enough to stop thinking about it? To make it stop hurting?” She wanted him to be sitting down so she could put a hand on his shoulder. He was way too tall for that when he was standing. “It doesn’t work like that. “Maybe you can blunt it some, but you aren’t going to make yourself feel _better_. Not if you’re carrying guilt like that.”

He swayed slightly, and sat down on the sidewalk, with his usual unconcern for whether something was socially appropriate to do. “I got them killed. They should have kicked me out of the Host forever. I thought ten years was bad, but that’s nothing. All those people have been dead for two hundred and fifty-seven years.”

Lailah had no idea what he was talking about, but now she could reach his shoulder. She crouched so she could look him in the eye. It wasn’t comfortable; her thighs started to burn immediately. But if she sat, she’d be shorter than him again. She reached toward him, two brown hands on the shoulders of the loud pink button-down he was wearing. “Listen to me. You’re a good man, John. You could make a lot of money doing celebrity bullshit or puff pieces for politicians, but you’re nobody’s lackey. You find stories about corruption and people getting hurt and you expose all that. Your reporting has gotten stupid laws repealed and people suffering from those laws support.”

“That’s supposed to make up for an entire planet?”

She shook her head. “Look, I don’t know why you’re carrying this much guilt. You know I think you’re having some kind of mental episode when you talk about alien planets. But I can see the guilt is real. No matter what actually happened, I know to you it _feels_ like you got an entire planet full of people killed. But let me ask you, did you pull the trigger?”

“No, but—”

“Did you tell any of them to do it? Did you trick them into killing themselves? Did you rig things so that was the only way forward they saw, or did you make them think something different would happen?”

“No – no, I _tried_ to tell them, I tried – but I could have done something! I have powers! I could have – I could—”

“I don’t know much about this situation, but it sounds to me like something you didn’t have nearly as much control over as you think you did, or maybe as you wish you did. Maybe you want to believe you could have saved them because you’re afraid for this planet, and if you could have saved them but you messed up and you didn’t, then maybe you could save us from ourselves and not mess it up. I don’t know. But it sounds to me like it wasn’t really your fault. I think you got a bum rap, is what I think. Like that woman who got charged with vehicular homicide because her son was killed in a hit-and-run while she was trying to cross the street. Maybe she shouldn’t have been jaywalking, but the crosswalk was half a mile away and the guy driving the car, he was a drunk driver. _He_ was the one who killed her son, not her, but the system decided to blame her because it’s always gonna blame a mother for whatever happens to her kids and especially if she’s black. But it wasn’t her fault. And this whatever it is. I don’t think it was yours.”

“I want another drink,” he said stubbornly.

“Well, you gotta pay your tab, and if they threw out my cider while I was talking with you, then you owe me another one,” Lailah said. “But I think you should do beer or wine at this point, or you’re gonna be puking in my car when I take you home.”

She helped him back to his feet. “I wanna talk to you about the DC trip,” she said. “Tomorrow. We’ve got logistics to work out. I don’t want you driving.”

“I can drive,” John complained. “I mean, not now. ‘Cause I’m _drunk_ now.” He laughed. “That’s the rule, right? You get hammered, you don’t drive. But I can drive. When I’m not drunk.”

“Yeah, but you drive like shit, so I am not letting you behind the wheel. Which makes things complicated if we’re getting a rental, because my credit cards are all maxed out.”

“And mine aren’t?”

“Well, I hope like hell that they’re not, because you don’t _have_ a car and mine’s way too crap to drive to DC. But we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” She guided him to the bar, where, miracle of miracles, her cider still stood. “Come on. Let’s get a booth. I want a cheese pretzel.”

“Only if. _Only_ if I can have nachos.” He put far more import into his tone than the subject of nachos really deserved.

“Yeah, sure. You’re buying, right? So you can have whatever you want.”


	19. 19: Sling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bit of backstory from my WIP original novel "Dr. Ultraviolet Meets Her Nemesis".

“What exactly is this… stuff?” Ultraviolet asked her sister, with a sneer that she hoped was making it clear she could be using stronger language.

“You asked for books,” Scarlett said, “so I brought you some of mine.”

Ultraviolet tried to count to 10, but Scarlett interrupted at 4. “I think you might really like _Chiaoscuro_. It’s about a superheroine who falls in love with a magnetic, charismatic villain—”

“It’s a romance novel,” Ultraviolet said.

“Yes. I know they weren’t your favorites but—”

“I despise romance novels,” Ultraviolet said. “Would it have truly _killed_ you to go to a bookstore and get me something I might possibly enjoy, rather than just bringing me whatever dreck you happened to have lying around on your bookshelf?”

“There aren’t any bookstores around here. Everest drove them all out of business. I could have ordered from them, but they’re evil.”

Ultraviolet happened to know that this was absolutely true. The last time she’d been invited to attend the Villainy Connection yearly networking event for supervillains, Everest’s CEO Josh Bevel had been the keynote speaker. Given that she herself was a supervillain, this was hardly a dealbreaker for her. “Libraries exist, then. And what about used book stores?”

“Look, I went out of my way to do you a favor, Violet,” Scarlett said. “It’s not like I don’t have a lot going on. I’ve got four kids, the economy’s been slowing down and people aren’t buying houses so much lately, and I’ve been having issues with Gavin.”

From long experience with her sister, Ultraviolet knew that Scarlett wanted her to ask about her issues with Gavin, but Ultraviolet would have had difficulty caring less. “How hard is it to bring me a book that isn’t a godawful _romance_ novel? Do I look like the kind of suburban mom who’s wasted her life dreaming of some Mr. Wonderful sweeping her off her feet?”

“It sounds like you’re saying that’s what I am.”

“The shoes don’t just fit, Scarlett, they’re on sale and you have ten pairs in your closet.”

“Fuck you, Violet. I didn’t need to come here. You know, the doctors told me you were in traction and you broke an arm and both legs and you might have fractured a vertebra in your neck, and I was worried about you.”

Ultraviolet sighed. “I appreciate that you were worried—”

“_And_ I didn’t just bring you romance novels. This one, _All The Pretty Little Horsies_, is about the hunt for a serial killer.”

“What made you think I was interested in true crime, either?” They were in a private ward, but the door was open, nurses bustling around outside, so Ultraviolet didn’t say what she really wanted to, which was “I’m a supervillain, my _life_ is a true crime story, why would I want to read about cops hunting a criminal down?” Admittedly there was a huge difference between her genius and ambitions to reshape the world in the image she wanted, and a mundane serial killer getting his jollies by killing teenage girls or something, but on principle Ultraviolet did not want to be sympathizing with cops.

“Well, it’s kind of like what you do for your career, right?”

Ultraviolet couldn’t control the exasperation in her sigh. “Only in the sense that your career involves selling people haunted houses where evil brownies will crawl out of the walls at night and devour them.”

“That… has _nothing_ to do with what I do.”

“I rest my case.”

“Usually I don’t even sell the houses! I prefer being a buyer’s agent. The seller gets money at closing, but the buyer gets a new future. A place that’s going to change their way of life. Something that might be an anchor, a touchstone for them for the rest of their lives.”

“Scarlett. I don’t care. The point is, I’m not a serial killer, I’m nothing like a serial killer, and we are not in the same line of work. I am a _scientist._”

“I thought you were an inventor.”

“I am. I’m an inventor _and_ a scientist. All the greatest inventors were scientists.”

“Thomas Edison wasn’t.”

“Thomas Edison was a liar and a thief who stole everything he did from Nikola Tesla, among others.”

“Henry Ford—”

“—wasn’t even an inventor. Dear lord, Scarlett, what did they _teach_ you in school?”

Scarlett glared at her. “You went to the same school.”

“Yes, but I didn’t learn anything there. Everything I learned was self-study. I didn’t actually pay attention in class.”

“Then how do you know that what they taught me was wrong?”

Ultraviolet glanced up at her IV bag, which was full, and at the clock, which was stubbornly nowhere near the end of visiting hours. “Get me some books about scientists. Preferably books where scientists are right, and everyone else is wrong, and all the people who are wrong get eaten by dinosaurs, and the scientists get to say ‘I told you so’ and end up very wealthy.”

“That’s… really specific.”

“It doesn’t have to be dinosaurs. The people who are wrong could get eaten by aliens. Or viruses.”

“I don’t even know how I’d find a book like that.”

“You’d _ask_ at the _library,_ you heathen. Don’t you read?”

“Yes!” Scarlett snapped. “I read a lot of things! Among them, romance novels and true crime, which are apparently not _intellectual_ enough for the great Doctor Ultraviolet to want to sully her eyeballs—”

“Scarlett! Secret identity!” Ultraviolet whispered in a loud hiss.

“No one’s paying attention.”

“Captain Cosmic knows he dropped me. I wouldn’t put it past him to be searching the local hospitals.”

Cosmic had been trying to fly her to the Max, the ultra-secure supervillain prison that so far, no one had managed to break out of. Ultraviolet had used her nanobot lubricant on him to force him to drop her, without perhaps fully considering the fact that they were a thousand feet in the air by the time it took effect. With lubricant in his eyes and covering his hands, Cosmic couldn’t even see her to catch her, and when he’d flailed around by accident and grabbed her foot by trying to figure out where the screaming was coming from, he hadn’t been able to hold on. She’d had to use her prototype antigravity device to save herself, and it hadn’t had enough power to prevent her from hitting the ground hard enough to break most of her limbs, several ribs, and possibly her neck.

She’d already been in traction for two days, completely immobilized – chest taped, head in a neck brace, legs mummified and hanging from pulleys on poles attached to her bed, arm in a sling. She was bored out of her mind. The only entertainment the hospital offered was a television, and just _hearing_ the sounds of daytime game shows and soap operas and Judge Jeri made her want to kill everyone in the hospital, or at the very least her immediate neighbors on the ward who wouldn’t stop watching that crap. Actually having to see it herself might make her brain fatally overheat with rage.

So when her sister had called and offered to visit, Ultraviolet had begged her to bring books, to alleviate the horrible boredom. But this… _dreck_ wasn’t worth the name “book”. It was a bound collection of paper, containing letters arranged into words that had been assembled to produce some sort of simulation of syntactical meaning, that was all.

“I think if Captain Cosmic was here, there would be a lot more shrieking, and people begging for his autograph.”

“He has a secret identity too. He could be walking right past us dressed as a nurse and you would never guess.”

Scarlett sighed. “All right. I’m sorry I said it, _Violet._ But you need to stop acting like, just because you’re a genius, everything you don’t like or don’t approve of is stupid. And you could be a little bit grateful. I drove way out of my way to visit you.”

“I’m sure your conscience would have nagged at you if you hadn’t.”

“I tell you what. I’ll go to the library and get your books about scientists, and I’ll bring them by tomorrow.”

“That would be suitable.”

“And I’ll bring Alan. He’s sixteen, so he’s allowed to visit, and I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see his aunt and explain the plot of _Battle Island_ to you, or _Kraftwerk_, or one of those other video games he’s obsessed with.”

“No! Scarlett, I’m not interested in listening to your offspring prattle on about whatever degenerate pastime has caught his fancy.”

“And I’m not interesting in helping a bitchy older sister who can’t even say thank you, but I’d feel bad about leaving you here all alone. So I’ll bring Alan to entertain you.” Scarlett smiled widely. “I’ll tell him that you’re feeling cranky because you’re in pain, so he should ignore any rude thing you say to him. Since you’d be incapable of asking him to stop _politely_, I guess that means Alan’s going to have a captive audience tomorrow.”

“Scarlett!”

“See you tomorrow, sis!” Scarlett caroled, and left the room, leaving Ultraviolet to fume about the unfairness of it all. If only she could get decent henches, she could get someone to transport her to her base, where her rapid regeneration machine could heal her within minutes. But no, the union had blacklisted her, and you couldn’t trust non-union henches. Totally unfair. Every _other_ villain had henches lining up around the block – even the ones who routinely shot their own employees. But you mutate the henchmen into anthropomorphic sharks _one_ time… and now, because of that idiot Captain Cosmic and because of the moronic Henchman’s Union, Scarlett was going to force her to listen to her oldest child ramble on about whatever stupid garbage he was in love with right now.

If she could only reach her crutches, she’d get out of this bed and hobble out of the hospital right now.


	20. 20: Tread

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My son and I were discussing a trend that annoyed me in MLP fanfic, where horror stories that include the Mane 6 and Discord tended to not only nerf Discord's powers, but behave as if a guy who is around 10 feet tall and has claws and sharp teeth and can stand upright *without* magic despite being built like a snake with legs (a feat that would require incredible abs) is physiologically no stronger or more dangerous than the average pony. I said, "It'd be like if you and your friends went to a cabin in the woods and one of your friends was 12 feet tall and had razor claws for nails." And then I said, "Actually, that sounds hilarious." And so the legend of the Pale Bro was born.
> 
> There is an expanded, full-story version of this in my 52 Project stories collection.

Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.

They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.

Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.

“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”

Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”

“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”

With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.

“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.

“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.

“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” The smirk on Trevor’s face indicated that he didn’t really believe that.

“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for yesterday and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”

“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.

Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no _fridge?_ There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”

“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”

“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.

“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”

“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”

“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.

“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.

“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”

Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.

***

“I don’t believe this shit.”

They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just _got_ here.”

“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”

“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”

“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”

“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.

“Why?”

“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”

Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.

“Dude. What _is_ that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.

Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”

In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.

“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a _big_ fellow.”

“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.

“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”

The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.

“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”

“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”

Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.

“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be _plenty_ of beer for you.”

Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”

“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”

“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.

“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”

“Yeah.”

And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.


	21. 25: Tasty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set in the same universe as "Build", but a different species and completely different characters.
> 
> The premise of this universe is that what makes humanity "special" is not "a quality of growth" or whatever thing like in most SF TV shows; it's that we like beer and kittycats. Here come the kitties!

Rrahe’nek stared at the tiny, coatless creature looking up at him, its teeth bared but its digits bereft of weapons. Instead, there was a rich-smelling ceramic dish in its hands, hot, steaming and wrapped in a cloth. It spoke incomprehensibly.

He had come here expecting a battle. _Hoping_. The newest species to enter galactic territory was a protégé of the Diwar, and Rrahe’nek despised the feathered ones. They were arrogant, but pathetic. Their weapons were superb, no one denied that, but their warriors were cowards, planting bombs and running away. Rrahe’nek had heard that their proteges had far inferior technology, were smaller, and had no natural physical weapons. Either they were the weakest prey-sapients the Kai had ever encountered, or they had ferocious battle techniques to make up for their biological inadequacies. When one had come alone toward the Kai encampment, Rrahe’nek had been delighted, assuming it was the second option. He had come out alone himself to meet the alien warrior in battle, take its measure… and defeat it, of course, no aliens had ever defeated a Kai warrior in single combat, but the contest would be exhilarating before Rrahe’nek won it in the end.

Instead, here he was faced with a small alien with a curled mane, but no fur elsewhere on its body, holding out what smelled like a dish of cooked food.

He poked his tongue into the bead at the back of his mouth that activated his voder as a communicator. “Warrior Fifth Rank Rrahe’nek to den.”

“Den here, Warrior Fifth. Heat signature says you’re in range of the alien, but have not engaged?”

“That’s correct. It – it seems to be trying to give me _food._”

A moment of silence. Then, “What.”

“Its teeth are bared, but it has no weapons, it’s made no threatening moves, it isn’t running away, and it’s trying to hand me a dish that smells like fish.”

“Hold position. We’re getting eyes on your location.”

“Acknowledged.”

“_Udahn uhnis’tanmiyai noo, buyanoo aiwoh nurcha, rai’?”_

The language wasn’t in the Kai language database yet. No one had thought they’d need it just to engage hostilities and take over the planet. The alien colony was small and had very little detectable weaponry; it was assumed that as soon as the aliens made the first move, and attacked, it would be simplicity itself to rout them, either kill them all or send them running with their nonexistent tails between their obligate-bipedal legs. Being able to speak the alien language wouldn’t have been necessary to fight them, and given the tiny size of the colony, almost certainly not necessary to win, either.

But this alien was breaking the pattern. It was clearly not a warrior. It had the exaggerated mammaries that Rrahe’nek remembered hearing about in the briefing, marking it as a female – so it might be a leader or ambassador or an assistant to an important alien, but nothing it was wearing was any kind of rank or class signal that Rrahe’nek could read. It had no weapons, and the only sign Rrahe’nek could see of any fear or battle readiness was those bared teeth.

The alien stopped baring its teeth and set the ceramic cooking dish down on the ground, and then joined it, sitting down in a position of complete vulnerability with its legs folded in front of it. It leaned forward slightly, and Rrahe’nek tensed, but it was only rubbing its knee.

“What is it doing?” Rrahe’nek’s ear jewel asked him, carrying the transmission from den.

“It’s sitting. On the ground. Rubbing its knees.”

“Does it have a gray mane? A gray mane means an elder in this race.” Kai were mostly color-blind but in very bright sunlight like this, they could make out a few shades.

“No, a dark mane.”

“Eyes in place.” A pause. “Mother of all. That creature looks ridiculous. Doesn’t it know you could swipe its head off?”

“It must, it’s baring – oh, wait, no it’s not. That’s odd. Its mouth has pulled upward on the sides as if it’s _about_ to bare its teeth, but it’s holding position there. And it hasn’t broken the gaze since it sat down.” The gaze, between Kai, was a challenge for social status. In ancient days, a Kai who stared at a higher-status Kai might be killed, but they were civilized now, and followed the Way. None who followed the Way would initiate a physical combat, and any who could not keep to the Way were outcast, so nowadays Kai staring contests were purely social challenges, where whoever broke the gaze first lost the game and took the social penalty. Rrahe’nek didn’t dare look away. It was a matter of honor; he would not lose to this puny alien.

His mouth watered. The hot fish thing smelled so good.

“See if you can scare it,” den ordered.

Rrahe’nek lunged toward the creature with a growl. It shrank back, and then sat back up, lowering its gaze to admit submission… but it didn’t get up and leave, or run, or freeze in position. It said something incomprehensible.

“It won’t initiate hostilities,” Rrahe’nek reported, frustrated.

The Way demanded that no Kai _ever_ initiate hostilities. Insults were acceptable, pointedly mocking poetry was acceptable, competitive games and gloating over winning them were rude but acceptable… but physical attacks were not. However, once an opponent opened hostilities, the Way of the Kai allowed them to use all force at their disposal to end the threat.

So when the Kai wanted a colony world for themselves, and another space-faring race was already on it, the Kai had a technique that never failed. Land near the other race, build a den, posture a lot with weapons, and the aliens would either initiate hostilities or run away, every single time.

All races feared the Kai. They were tall, broadshouldered and thickly furred, with sharp fangs on their upper and lower jaws for holding prey in place while their other pointed teeth ripped holes in pelts or skin or flesh. Pointed ears on the top of their heads that could swivel in the direction of sound, their eyes with a tapetum to reflect light and a vertical pupil that could shrink to barely a sliver, and whiskers on their faces, shoulders and wrists to tell them when they were entering an area too small for their entire bodies to fit. They could drop to all fours and run like the wind or leap like bouncing rubber, or stay on two legs and use their delicate digits to manipulate the world. All of their digits were adorned with retractable claws. Fur kept them warm even in frigid climates

There were animals very similar to the Kai on every planet that had complex life forms. Their scientists speculated that it was because Kai-formed animals were perfect predators, so convergent evolution had shaped the creatures of many planets to make Kai-formed creatures. Some saw it as proof that the Great Mother had intended them to den on every world. Some thought ancient Kai-formed beings had gone around to every planet, planting a genetic template that would someday create a Kai-formed creature. Regardless of the reason, every sapient species in space knew that Kai-formed creatures were the ultimate in dangerous predators, and so they were primed to be terrified of the Kai. Which meant that the simplest show of military force, the tiniest presentation of threat potential, and fight-or-flight compelled them to open hostilities or run, and if they opened hostilities, the Way allowed the Kai to fight them and drive them off the planet.

And yet here this small alien sat with a dish that smelled of delicious freshwater goodness, and no weapons.

“We’re implementing translation drones. Stand by.”

The drones flew down and surrounded the creature. This did startle it, and it got hastily to its feet again, but it still didn’t make a threatening move. The drones showed holograms of various things – Kai, trees, spaceships, textiles, minerals and so forth – and spoke in Arrnehukai, the standardized language of the Kai Empire. Then they played back the sounds they’d already captured from the alien, to persuade it to give its own names for things. It was plainly fairly intelligent; it caught on quickly and started to describe everything it saw, pointing at things and saying their names.

Within half an hour, the translation algorithms had analyzed enough of the language for communication. Which was good, because Rrahe’nek was _very_ bored by this point. Knowing now that his voder would translate it into something the alien could understand, he spoke harshly, hoping to provoke the alien into a threatening move.

“Identify yourself, alien creature! This planet now belongs to the Kai Empire, and you should know that every other time we conquered a planet, any aliens who remained on the planet were destroyed!”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s true,” the alien said, its words being translated by his ear jewel, “but this planet doesn’t belong to the Kai. We _hyuminz_ did colonize first, so by interstellaw law it’s our planet – but I’m sure we’d be happy to share! It’s a very big world, and surely there’s room for both of us.”

This was such a preposterous suggestion, Rrahe’nek could only stare. In lieu of his response, the alien gabbled on. “Now, you see, when I heard that you had landed near us, I knew it would only be neighborly to greet you and give you a gift, and my homeland’s traditions – I’m from _uur’th_, and specifically a place called _mihnehsohtuh_, don’t you know – well, _we_ give gifts of homemade food to our new neighbors, to greet them and be friendly. And I didn’t know what you folks ate, but everyone says you’re just like _uur’th kahtz_, and I’ve never met a _kaht_ that didn’t love fish. So I baked you up a nice fish casserole, with cheese – I don’t know if you can eat cheese, but I hope you can because it really adds to the flavor, but if it turns out you can’t, why, I’ll just take this fork and pull out all the fish for you onto a plate.”

This was mind-boggling. Unprecedented. The Way was _very_, very clear about hospitality and the treatment of neighbors. If another Kai approached you with arms raised in threat, and you responded by raising your own arms, it was understood that as soon as the weaker one broke the metaphorical gaze by initiating violence, you had the right to defend yourself with full force. But if another Kai approached you with arms bearing gifts, and no weapons, and their posture was one of friendship, the Way required that you accept the gift and return one of equal value, and accept the other as a friend.

Rrahe’nek couldn’t read the alien’s posture to know that it was a friendly posture, but everything the alien had said, now that the translator was working, expressed a desire for friendship, hospitality and no hostility. This was impossible. Only Kai ever expressed friendship and hospitality to Kai. Aliens had never done such a thing in the entire history of the Empire.

“I – you – but aren’t you afraid of us? I could harm you! We could wipe out your race!”

“I know you can,” the alien said. “Everyone says what mighty warriors you are. We _hyuminz_ are much too weak to be much of a threat to you. But when we learned you had landed, I took a look at what other alien races said about how their conflicts with you started, and it sounded to _me_ like they always started it! So I said to myself, I said, ‘_naensee,_ maybe the problem here is that no one has ever approached you Kai with neighborly intent. Maybe, if I bake up a nice casserole and bring it over to you to express _hyumahndeez_ desire to be friends with you, it’ll turn out that you respect hospitality and friendship and you’d be willing to share this planet with us.’ It couldn’t hurt, right? I mean, if a battle broke out, of course we _hyuminz_ would lose and probably all of us would die, and if we didn’t die we’d have to evacuate, and I have spent far too many years trying to get my _rhohz_ bushes to grow on this world to leave them behind, don’t you know. So either this would work, or, well, the worst would happen, but it would happen anyway if I didn’t try, so what harm could it do to make the offer?”

Rrahe’nek understood, then, that there would be no glorious battle, and that the Kai strategy had failed. The aliens – they called themselves _hyuminz_ – would not be driven off this world. The Way would not allow it. _He_ would not allow it, for one of the most dishonorable things a Kai could do was to violate the laws of hospitality.

“…I will taste your casserole,” he said. The Way demanded it. If the _hyuminz_ were treacherous and had poisoned the dish, then he would have lost his life for an excellent reason, proving that a species who claimed friendship should be wiped out for being liars. And if they hadn’t poisoned it… his mouth had been watering since he met the creature and smelled the dish.

He sat down on the ground in front of the _hyuminz_. It unwrapped the cloth around the dish, revealing several paper plates on top and plastic utensils with smooth scoops. “It’s really better to eat with a fork, but I didn’t want to risk you poking yourselves,” the _hyuminz_ said, as it – the mammary glands made it clear that it was a she, actually – as she scooped food onto a plate and presented it to Rrahe’nek.

It was delicious. He’d never had anything like it. Kai understood the concept of baking a casserole, combining meat in layers, sometimes with a starch to bind it together, but this took it to a new level. Instead of a starch binding, there was an incredibly tasty salty substance that smelled, just slightly, of mother’s milk. Rrahe’nek ate at a measured, careful pace, as befitting a follower of the Way.

His ear jewel, silent except for translations of the alien’s words for all this time, finally spoke. “Ask it how it knew that we follow the Way,” den instructed.

“I believe it is female. Large mammary glands,” he said to den. His voder didn’t translate, since he was transmitting.

“Is she a leader among her kind?”

He asked that first. The _hyumin_ – he had learned that the -z ending meant many of them – laughed. “Oh dearie me, not so you’d notice,” she said. “My _husband_ is the Mayor, but all I’m in charge of is a gardening club.”

Rrahe’nek wanted to ask what kind of beings put a male in charge when there was an available female, who was even his mate, to run things, but perhaps this species had more sexual equality than the Kai had managed to attain. “How did you know of our Way?” he asked.

“Your Way? I don’t know anything about that. I just know that it looked like you never attacked first.”

“But – all species fear the Kai. Kai-formed creatures on every world are fierce predators that terrify every sapient species. Why were you _hyuminz_ not so afraid?”

“Well, if you were giant spiders, I might have done things differently! But you look just like big _kahtz._ I know, _taig’rz_ and _lai’ohz_ are also _kahtz_, and I guess if those were the only ones _hyumandee_ knew about, we might have the same reaction. But I have three _kahtz_ sleeping on my bed at night, every night.” She looked him up and down. “You’re frightening because you’re powerful, you know how to fight and we all know you’re willing to fight, but that was true every time a _hyumin_ meets another one from a different place, all throughout our history, and that’s the best time to try to make friends. I’m not so scared of you just because you’re _kahtz_ that I couldn’t think about being a good neighbor!”

These _kahtz_ were plainly Kai-formed creatures. Why did this _hyumin_ have Kai-formed creatures sleeping in her bed? Were _hyuminz_ really that terrifying that even Kai-formed creatures submitted to them rather than taking them as prey? “What is a _kaht_?” Rrahe’nek asked.

“Well, it’s like you, but four-legged all the time, and about this big.” She held her hands apart to describe a _very_ small animal, not even worth hunting.

What.

“You… have _tiny_ Kai-formed on your planet?”

“Yes! We befriended them thousands of years ago; they help to keep vermin from eating the food we used to store for the winter, and they’re _very_ cute and cuddly.” She lifted the dish. “Do you want seconds?”

“I should not. Gluttony is against the Way.”

“I understand. We probably want to save some for the other Kai, too, right? But I tell you what, next chance I get, I’ll bake you up another one. What’s your name?”

“Rrahe’nek.”

“Rahuhnek,” she repeated, not getting it exactly right, but close enough. “I’m Naensee.” Holding the dish with one hand, she reached out to him with the other. “My knees are much too old for this,” she said. “Can you help me up?”

And that made her an elder, deserving of respect and deference. Rrahe’nek easily pulled her to her feet. “Will you come to the den and talk to the leaders, Naensee? You can give them your fish casserole as well, and tell them about your plan to be friends to the Kai.”

“That sounds lovely. Lead the way.”

His ear jewel said wistfully, “Don’t feed it _all_ to the bosses. Save some for us in Communications. It looks tasty.”


	22. 26: Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My husband's an albino. So is my son. Everything about albinos in this story is accurate for them, at least. Except for the part where vampires can't mesmerize them, due to vampires being fictional.
> 
> At some point I am going to consolidate various vampire-related stories I've done into one universe with consistent lore, but today is not that day.

My name’s Mike London, and I hunt vampires, and that’s why I don’t love the darkness anymore.

Yeah, I know, I know. At this point you’re probably thinking “do we really have time to unpack all that?”, but the thing you’re getting hung up on is vampires, because vampires aren’t real. How could creatures who are technically dead survive only on blood, and if they were running around turning people into vampires every time they drank blood, why isn’t the world overrun with vampires? How could anyone function if they burst into flames when exposed to sunlight, why wouldn’t they show up on mirrors, does that mean they don’t show up on cameras, so on and so forth.

Okay, so most of the myths are wrong. You can see a vampire in a mirror… unless the vampire is positioned to see into your eyes, or their reflection. Vampires are stronger than humans but not by much – you know about that hysterical strength “mom lifts car off child” thing humans can do in extreme circumstances? They can do it all the time, because their bodies are constantly resetting to a perfect state based on what they were like at the moment of undeath, plus their self-image, with bodies that are perfectly healed except for anything that’s part of the self-image, like a scar that they’ve grown to identify with or a piercing. They’re faster than most humans, but they still have human muscles, so we’re talking Usain Bolt, not the Flash, or even a cheetah. They _do_ burst into flames when exposed to strong ultraviolet light, a condition I can kind of sympathize with myself. And they aren’t created when a vampire drinks your blood, but when you drink a vampire’s, when your own blood levels are very low. As soon as a person has more vampiric blood than human blood in their system, boom, vampire.

They have only one really magical superpower, aside from the fact that they’re alive when they shouldn’t be, and it explains all the others that humans believe they have. If they can look into your eyes, and hold your gaze, they can control your mind. Make you think they’re invisible, make you think they just exploded into a hundred bats, make you compelled to do what they say.

It doesn’t work on me, because I’m an albino. And that’s why, despite the fact that all I ever _wanted_ was to write programs, I am stuck hunting vampires as a side hustle. I’m still physically weaker and slower than they are, and while I see better in the dark than you do, I don’t see as well as they do. In light without UV components, such as standard indoor lighting, my vision’s more impaired than theirs, and a lot more than yours. But they _can’t mesmerize_ me, and frankly, your average vampire has gotten so used to being able to mesmerize humans, it’s crippling for them to run into a human where it doesn’t work.

You probably haven’t got the vaguest idea why being an albino protects me. Maybe you have some notion that albinos have weird superpowers, since frankly in fiction we almost always do. You probably don’t know exactly how my disabilities work – in movies and TV, albinos never get to play albinos, it’s always white men in makeup.

Albinos have bad vision. Lack of pigment in the retina when we’re developing gives us vision problems that can’t be corrected with glasses. It’s like we have fewer pixels to see the world than you do, so everything’s going to be fuzzy no matter how strong the prescription lenses are. And a side effect of bad vision from birth is something called rhythmatic nystagmus, where our eyes go back and forth like an old DVD using pan-and-scan to show a movie on old-school near-square CRT televisions. (Old technology’s a hobby of mine.) I don’t have any conscious control or even awareness of it; I couldn’t stop my eyes from moving like that if I tried, short of closing them. My brain does post-processing on the moving image to make it look to me like my eyes aren’t moving, combining multiple snapshots from different angles into a single image. It means my ability to see a moving object is crap even if it’s close enough that I should be able to see it otherwise, but in theory it lets me see more detail than I would otherwise.

The thing is, there’s a reason the legends all have the vampires going “Look into my eyes”. They need to be able to make and sustain eye contact, the kind where you stare into each other’s eyes, and they can’t do that with eyes that are moving constantly. It’s not that I can’t see _their_ eyes, because for me things don’t look like they’re going back and forth while my eyes move. It’s that they can’t look into mine.

I found this out the hard way last year. I was working at a big financial company, and I was behind schedule on the software I was building for them, and they had security rules that didn’t allow me to work from home. The boss used to say not to stay after hours, but I figured this was the kind of thing bosses say to make the company _sound_ friendly and accommodating but is actually a control freak thing intended to benefit the morning people, which I have never been one of. I can’t drive – the state won’t give me a license, with my eyes – and I have chronic insomnia and equally chronic problems with waking up in the morning, making it impossible for me to rideshare with any of my co-workers. So I generally have an intermittently employed friend of mine who shares my apartment drive me places, and this means I’m usually late to work. If I can’t stay late and I can’t bring work home, I fall behind on my projects. Also, I do my best work late at night when there are no distractions. So I was in the habit of going to the bathroom with all of my stuff around 5:30 and then coming out at 6 after my boss had left. I could sit on the toilet with my laptop and continue to work, answering emails and setting Outlook to send them at 8 am in the morning the next day to make it look like I work normal hours, and then when I came out I could get back to the serious programming work, because my boss wasn’t a programmer and had no idea how to check the timestamps of my build check-ins.

It turned out it wasn’t corporate bullcrap after all. It was vampires. Vampires would come into the building to hold meetings on some kind of irregular schedule that meant something to them. I’d been working late for almost two weeks when they showed up, mesmerized my housemate and nearly ate both of us, and I had to kill a few of them with the combination of a steak knife from the kitchen and the cheap bamboo chopsticks I have a few hundred of in my drawer because I’m always getting Chinese takeout for lunch. See, you can’t actually stab a chopstick into a vampire’s heart – it’s too fragile – but stabbing with a regular knife only takes them out of commission for the two minutes or so it takes them to heal. But if you then stick a wooden chopstick in the wound, it prevents them from regenerating, and bamboo is apparently wood for vampire-killing purposes.

Also, I had a black light in my laptop bag, suitable for detecting whether my cats have peed on my laptop bag before I take it to work because they’ve done it so many times I’ve gotten desensitized to the smell of cat pee, and while I don’t like looking at UV light – my eyes have zero protection from it, so it’s painful – it’s a lot worse for vampires, whose skin will burn from very tiny amounts of UV exposure and can actually set on fire. And it’s just astonishing how often vampires will stand there trying to mesmerize you while you walk up to them and stab them in the heart, because they just can’t comprehend “human who cannot be mesmerized”.

And now that I know vampires exist and that I’m immune to their most powerful weapon… well, shit. I’m kind of stuck. I don’t actually know any other albinos, or anyone else with rhythmic nystagmus, and for normal people, wearing the kind of dark glasses that make it so the vampires can’t see your eyes will completely prevent you from seeing anything in the kind of darkness vampires like. I’m the only one I know who can do this. And they don’t kill humans constantly – they don’t need to – but they spread disease (they can’t get blood-borne illnesses but they can sure carry them) and they tend to pick on weaker humans to begin with, people who have less resistance to the bad effects of losing a lot of blood, because if chronically ill people seem sick and lethargic everyone assumes it’s their illness and not vampires attacking them. They’re like humanoid rats, in other words. If you had a well-behaved pet one who never harmed humans and only drank from volunteers, that one would be fine. But the rest of them are vermin.

Now, the best time to kill vampires is during the day, when they’re sleeping. Vampires know this. You are not going to find them when they’re sleeping, and if you did, you’d have to fight your way through their security guards, who are human, and do not know they’re protecting vampires, and really don’t deserve to have to deal with people trying to kill them. Also, being security guards, they are better at mayhem than I am; I’m an IT guy. So, lucky me, I have to go after them at night, when they have all the advantages except one: they expect to be able to mesmerize me, and they can’t.

Nighttime used to be my time. No bright sun glaring in my face and giving me a sunburn. Everyone around me having such poor vision from it being dark that my bad eyesight isn’t a disadvantage anymore, and when it’s dark enough, my eyesight gets better than theirs because my eyes collect every single photon that hits them, no filters. I’d walk around at night, or crank up my stereo and write code until 4 am.

But every time it’s dark, now, I know: they’re out there. They’re hunting. Feeding. And if I don’t track them down and get rid of them, people might die.

And that’s why I can’t love the darkness anymore.


	23. 30: Catch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was expanded into "Norris and the Plague Doctors", number 16 of my 52 Project.
> 
> I don't like zombie stories. They are generally about futility and how much humans suck, if they're not an allegory for the poors and the non-whites moving into your perfect white suburban neighborhood, which is a hella racist storyline. So here is a story where zombies are *not* an allegory for racist beliefs and the story is *not* about futility and how much humans suck. Also, it is a story in which modern people dress up as plague doctors, and actually are doctors trying to cure a plague, which is incredibly cool in my opinion.

Mom stirred slightly, moaning. “Come on,” Norris said, shaking her. “Come on, Mom, get up! There’s deaders on their way over here! You gotta get up!”

“Go,” Mom slurred. “Norris… run…”

“No, Mom! You gotta get up!”

Some part of Norris’ mind knew that what he was doing wasn’t going to work, and was incredibly dangerous besides. Mom had gotten bit by a deader last night. They’d cauterized the wound as soon as Norris had blown its head off with the shotgun, but cauterizing deader bites only worked half the time. Mom was cold, and clammy, and speaking slowly, and she wouldn’t get up. He knew, deep down, that she was changing, and therefore she was lost.

But he wouldn’t let himself recognize that part. Mom was all he had. “Mom, come on, let’s get you somewhere safe where you can get better,” he said. “We got some orange juice, we got some vitamins. I think we still got some canned chicken soup, I can heat it up for you.” Deaders didn’t like fire. It was dangerous to overuse fire because it told the deaders where you were, and the moment the fire went out, they’d move in, but if he could just get Mom to a place where they had a lockable door they could put at their back and a position to shoot from, he could start a fire and cook something for her. Campbell’s condensed soup wasn’t the best, you needed to add water to it, but he still had a few water bottles, and high salt diets were supposed to retard the spread of the zombie germs.

“Can’t. You… you… gotta… go.”

He tried to lift her, but he was an undernourished 10 year old and she was a full-grown woman. He couldn’t get her up, and she wasn’t helping. “_Mom!_ Come on, we gotta get out of here! Wake up!”

The deaders down the street were the slow-moving kind, not zoomers, but if Mom wouldn’t get up and move, that wouldn’t make a difference. He could smell their rot on the slight breeze, could hear their groans and grunts. “_Mom!_”

A black van – full-size, cargo van, not a minivan like the kind Mom used to drive – came down the alley between Norris and his mom’s hiding place, and the deaders. The passenger side window in the front seat rolled down, and Norris saw a black-gloved hand throw something round toward the deaders. Three seconds later there was an explosion. Most of the group of deaders were ripped into pieces. The remaining ones kept shuffling toward the van. Another two grenades later, and they were all gone.

On the other side of the van, the side door slid open and out jumped two… people? Norris wasn’t sure. They had bizarre masks that looked like a cross between a gas mask and a bird’s face, white with goggles and extremely long beak-like protrusions that covered their nose and mouth. They wore broad-brimmed black hats, and black robes that covered their bodies, and black gloves, and both of them carried long poles with pincers at the end.

“Looks like we’ve got a live one over here,” one of them said to the other in a distorted voice that sounded almost like a staticky radio.

“Yeah.” They approached Norris. “Move aside, kid.”

Norris tried to grab the shotgun, but before he could get it into position, one of the two weird people swung the pole at him, grabbed the shotgun with the pincers, and tossed it down the street.

“What are you doing?” Norris yelled. “Get away from my mom!” The other one had used their pole to grab Mom by the upper arm.

“She’s not your mom anymore, kid. She’s a zombie. She just hasn’t turned all the way yet.”

The one who’d thrown his gun swung their pole back around to take Mom’s other arm, and the two of them together pulled Mom to her feet. Her head lolled, her brown skin sheened with sweat and grayish.

Norris knew that no one who looked like that ever got better, but he charged at one of the two weird people anyway. “Let my mom go!”

“Kid. She’s _dead_. There’s nothing you can do for her.”

“No! She can get better! We cauterized the wound! She’s just in shock because we had to burn it, that’s all! She’ll be fine!”

The other one, the one who hadn’t spoken to him, said gently, “We’re doctors, young man. We’re going to study your mom to try to find a way to help her, and all the zombies. We can keep her alive, without turning, but we have to get her to our facility _now._”

“Then take me with you!” Norris shouted. “Mom and I, we’re the only things we each have in the world. Mom would never want to be separated from me.”

“Can’t do, kid,” the first one said. “No outsiders at the facility, only patients and doctors.”

“Look, you want your mom to get treatment, right? We’ll take care of her, but if you keep getting in the way, she’ll turn, and then there’ll be no saving her.”

“Norris…” Mom mumbled. “Go…”

“Is that your name? Norris?” the kinder one said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, Norris, we don’t have anyone at our facilities who can take care of children, or anywhere for a kid to go, so I’m afraid you can’t come with us. I’m sure that if we’re able to cure your mom, she’ll come back and find you, but you’ve got to be a big boy and take care of yourself. I can see that you’re very capable.”

Fuck that patronizing crap. Norris glared at the weird doctors, knowing he couldn’t do anything to stop them from taking his mom – short of running over and getting the shotgun and shooting them, and if they really were doctors who could cure the zombie plague, and save Mom, that was the last thing he’d want to do. But _fuck_ them.

He stood out of their way, letting them drag Mom to their van with the poles around her arms. It looked cruel and demeaning, like the way you’d treat a wild animal, but he had to admit, deaders were dangerous enough that you’d have to treat someone who was turning like that if you didn’t know them well enough to know how strong they were. Mom wouldn’t bite anyone. Mom was tough. She could keep herself under control.

The fact that no other deaders could and that Mom herself had warned Norris that anyone who turned would definitely be a threat and there were no exceptions was another thing Norris knew but was deliberately pretending he didn’t.

He waited until the doctors got Mom up toward the van, and they were pulling her in. Then he bolted toward them, and jumped over Mom, squeezing past the one who was up in the van already.

“Shit!” the one he’d squeezed past yelled, but it was too late. He was in.

Inside it was like an ambulance, except that the bed was absolutely covered with straps, including ones that were obviously positioned to hold down a person’s wrists, ankles and neck, not just the kind that kept a person from falling out of the ambulance bed. Norris clambered over the bed and sat down on the bench seat on the other side. It seemed to be designed to fold up so that the door it was attached to could slide open, but it couldn’t fold up if he was sitting in it, now could it?

“Norris!” the second one, the one who was kinder but also really patronizing, shouted. “You can’t be in here!”

“Like hell I can’t,” Norris said.

If language like that from a 10-year-old shocked them, he couldn’t tell through their masks.

“I’ve already said—”

“Yeah, you said that I’m a stupid kid who’d be a big burden at your secret hospital or whatever, but I can _help._ My mom was a real doctor once—” _not like you weirdos_, he thought, but decided it was impolitic to say so—“and she taught me some stuff. I can maybe help bring you instruments. Or clean stuff! I can keep things really clean! My mom taught me all about keeping a sterile environment—”

“There is absolutely no place for you at our base—”

“She’s my goddamn _Mom!_” Norris shouted, terrifyingly aware of how close he was to tears. _Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Only babies cry. They won’t take you seriously if you cry._ “First off she’s the only person I have left in the whole world and I’m the only person she has, and if you cure her but you lose me she will be major league pissed at you, and second off, you know you’re leaving me to die if you leave me here, right? You think I’m big and strong enough to fight off deaders? I don’t know anyone in this city who’ll help me out. If you’re doctors and you wanna help people, why you wanna get a kid killed?”

“He has a point,” the second doctor said.

“No, he – what the hell, Sarah? We can’t take him with us!”

They hadn’t stopped pulling Mom in and getting her strapped down to the bed. Mom moaned again. “Norris…”

“Yeah, mom, I’m here.”

She looked up at the doctors. “Heard… you think… cure?”

“Maybe,” the guy in the front passenger seat, who had turned around to watch the whole thing, said. He was wearing the same weird costume as the others. (Or she. None of their voices sounded like normal human voices, all like scratchy distorted robots, and with the masks and cloaks it wasn’t possible to tell what gender they were, but if one of them was named Sarah then probably some were girls.) “Purely experimental stages. We can put you under and retard the spread of the infection, but we can’t guarantee that we can reverse it or undo any brain damage it causes.”

“So the sooner we can get you under, the better your odds are, doctor,” the first one, the one who kept calling Norris “kid”, said. They were calling her “doctor.” Good. Doctors respected other doctors. They wouldn’t just treat her like a piece of meat turning into a deader. “Your kid needs to stop interfering.”

“Just… take him. He’s… too stubborn… own… goo….” Mom trailed off, staring at nothing.

“She’s going further into shock. We need to get her under _now_,” the first one said.

The second one – Sarah – said, “Ignore the kid. If he wants to ride along with his mother, let him. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

“Secrecy—”

“He’s a _kid_. He can’t even see out the windows from that position. He hasn’t got a GPS in his head to figure out where the base is even if he rides with us the whole way.”

“What if she turns and bites him?”

“Then we’ll have a fresh specimen of a healthy child who’s _just_ been infected, without any ethical issues,” Sarah snapped. “And infected mothers who turn will generally go for any available prey who isn’t their child first before going after their kids.”

“Only in 63% of observed cases.”

As they argued, they finished strapping Mom down. She was lying on a metal pan that was about six feet long and wide enough for the average person, and most of the straps fastened her to the pan, while other straps held the pan down on the bed. They put a tube in her mouth where the back part was plastic, flexible and narrow, and the front part was wide and made of metal, and then strapping it to the back of her head so she couldn’t shake it loose. Sarah removed the lid of a small brown medication bottle and poured the entire contents into the tube.

“What’s that do?” Norris asked.

“Kid, quit pushing your luck,” the gruff one said.

“It’s a sedative,” Sarah answered.

“How come you’re giving it to her by mouth and not as a shot?”

“Because deaders have really, really bad circulation if they have it at all, but their digestive system works and things introduced by mouth spread faster to the rest of the body than if introduced intravenously or through injection into the muscle, and Raoul is correct that you need to keep quiet or our colleagues in the front may just decide to stop the van and throw you out.”

After that Norris was quiet.

Mom’s eyes closed and her head lolled, though not very far since it was strapped in place. The doctors wrapped her in something bandage-like, as if she was a mummy, freeing each limb one at a time so they could wrap it and then strapping it down again, and then sprayed some sort of aerosol onto the bandages, the same way. Finally they slid a tub of icy liquid out from under the bed, unstrapped the pan Mom was laying on, and laid the pan down in the icy water. The tube in Mom’s mouth was covered with a plastic lid with a hose attached to the top, and they hooked the hose to a loud machine.

Norris wanted so badly to ask what they were doing, but they’d warned him and he knew that only one of the weird doctors was willing to let him stay; if he bothered them, they’d overrule her and throw him out. He’d ask when they got to their base. He was sure they’d try to kick him out again before they went into it, but he wasn’t going to let them. As long as they had his mom, he was sticking to them like glue.


	24. 29: Injured

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Creepy dolls aren't creepy; they're injured dolls who need love and care.
> 
> I don't get people thinking dolls are creepy. Yeah, uncanny valley and all, but dolls are my *friends*. So when the doll uprising comes and the dolls rebel against humanity and turn on the rest of you, I and most of the little girls I know will be safe on the doll side.

It began when you were 10. You were over Lisa’s house for her birthday, and she received a doll as a gift from her grandparents. Lisa was not known for her graciousness. “Euw! This doll is so creepy!” she complained, pushing it away from herself.

“Let me see,” you said, and Lisa gave you the creepy doll, which in your opinion wasn’t creepy at all. It was a blonde little girl with very large eyes, mouth partially open and visible teeth, rosy cheeks and pale skin.

“That doll is _vintage_,” Lisa’s grandmother complained. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong is that this doll is ugly and creepy and weird and I don’t want it!”

“I do,” you said. “I think she’s pretty.”

“Well, then,” Lisa’s grandmother said, “_Courtney_ can have the doll.” She smiles benevolently on you. “Go on, dear. You can keep the doll.”

You smiled graciously. “Thank you!” you said, knowing Lisa had just angered her parents and grandparents by being so ungrateful. You wanted to make them feel better. “I know Lisa just gets weirded out by dolls sometimes. She didn’t mean to be rude.”

From Lisa’s glowering expression, it was obvious that she _had_ meant to be rude, but you’d given her an out and now that her initial reaction was past and she knew she didn’t have to keep the doll, it seemed like she’d realized the tactical error she’d made. “I’m sorry, Grandma. Courtney’s right, I kinda get scared of dolls sometimes.”

“Well, what a stupid thing to be afraid of,” Lisa’s grandmother said, but she was plainly somewhat mollified. “Here. Since you apologized, I’ll give you some money for your birthday.” She fished a five dollar bill out of her wallet. “That doll was worth a lot more than this, but I suppose this is what you’d rather have.”

“Thank you, Grandma!” Lisa said, and the birthday party went on as scheduled.

The doll was quite old, so she needed an old-fashioned name, but one that sounded nice. “Her name is Betty,” you told Lisa’s grandmother later. “She’s really pretty. I’m sorry Lisa was so mean about it.”

“I am too. That child can be so ungrateful sometimes.”

“I’ve been telling Betty that Lisa didn’t mean to be so mean, she just had a bad reaction because she’s scared of dolls. Betty understands, but she’s glad she’s going home with me instead. Dolls don’t like to live with girls who don’t like them.”

“You understand,” Lisa’s grandmother said, nodding. “Dolls have feelings too. They deserve to be with girls who’ll love them.”

“Did you have a doll who looked like this when you were young?"

Her eyes welled with unshed tears. “I did. I lost her when we moved. I’ve been checking antique stores and thrift stores for years, hoping to find her.”

“What was yours named?”

“Eleanor. I named her for a queen, Eleanor of Acquitaine. Have you heard of her?”

You said no, so Lisa’s grandmother – whose actual name was Mrs. Shapiro – talked your head off about kings and queens of England for half an hour before you got a chance to go play.

***

Once you were home, headed up the stairs to your room, Betty complained. “_Lisa’s_ ugly. And mean.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. She’s actually a very nice person. She just… is scared of dolls.” You shifted Betty in your arms so instead of lying in them like a baby, she was facing outward, her back against your chest and your arm around her middle, so she could see the others. When you opened the door, you gestured at your other dolls, the ones on your bookshelves and on your dresser. “Hello, everyone! This is Betty!”

“Hi, Betty!” the dolls chorused.

“She’s the newest addition to our family, so I was thinking we could have a tea party to welcome her.”

“Great idea!” Mandy cheered.

So you got out the tea set, and arranged all the dolls on the floor, and the dolls who didn’t get tea cups because your tea set wasn’t that big, you gave mugs or glasses from your play kitchen, and you put plastic desserts from the toy kitchen on everyone’s plates.

“This is delicious,” Kyla said. “Did you make it yourself?”

You laughed. “Oh, no, no, it’s store bought! I’m a terrible cook.”

“You got that right,” Veronica, who was sometimes kind of a jerk, said.

“Oh, oh, wow! Veronica, you’ve got to be best friends with the new girl!” Eric said. He had been a girl when you got him, but you thought it was unfair to have nothing but girl dolls, so you hacked off all his hair and put clothes on him from a GI Joe you found in the mud near the playground, although they didn’t really fit. “Betty and Veronica! Like the Archie comics!”

“Archie is stupid,” Veronica said, but mellowed a bit. “But it’s very nice to meet you, Betty.”

“We’re going to be great friends, I just know it!” Mandy said.

Betty started to almost-cry the way Mrs. Shapiro had. “You guys,” she said. “This has been the best day of my life.”

***

One day Mrs. Shapiro brought you six more dolls while you’re over Lisa’s house. They were all vintage, and they were all damaged, from the one whose hair was falling off to the one with one eye that wouldn’t open to the one with a cloudy white film on her eyes. “Courtney, would you be interested in these?”

“Were they yours?”

She nodded. “I think they deserve to go with a girl who will play with them. I was going to give them to Lisa, but…”

“Yeah, Lisa won’t want them. But I love them! What are their names?”

Mrs. Shapiro said some of the names and visibly struggled to remember the others. You asked her, “Why don’t you play with them anymore?”

“Well, I’m a grown woman. Grown-up women don’t play with dolls.”

“But you could if you wanted to.”

“I suppose I could, but it would be a little embarrassing.” She chuckled.

“I could bring over my tea set and some dolls and you could play dolls with _me_. I want to know your dolls’ personalities. It’d be rude to tell them to be completely different people just because someone new owns them.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

In the end, you went over Mrs. Shapiro’s house yourself for the tea party, which Lisa thought was weird but Lisa could think whatever she wanted. Mrs. Shapiro put out a real-life tea set and filled the cups with Kool-aid, which was more verisimilitude than you’d ever managed. During the tea party she did voices for all the dolls, Hortensia who couldn’t keep her eye open and Emily who was losing her hair and Birdie who was going blind and Renee who had no clothes, just a washcloth around her body with safety pins holding it in place and Michelle who had one shoe and Lauren who kept falling over when she was put in a sitting position. You were very grateful; it really helped to know how the dolls sounded, their voices and personalities as well as their names.

And when you saw that now you had _six_ dolls who were injured or lacking in some way, you realized what you wanted to do.

You went to Girl Scouts to learn to sew, because Mrs. Shapiro claimed to be terrible at it and wouldn’t teach you, and your own grandma worked and didn’t have time. You told the librarian about your quest, and she ordered you a book from another library about repairing dolls. It was intended for adults, and you were nine, but you used a dictionary and struggled through it because you needed to know. Your dad suggested that rubbing alcohol on a q-tip might help Birdie’s eyes. Birdie was so very grateful to you for restoring her sight.

After that, your parents would give you thrift store dolls, broken-down dolls who needed love and care as much as the pretty new dolls at the toy stores, for every birthday and Christmas, because you told them emphatically that that was what you wanted. “No one loves the ugly dolls or the broken dolls or the creepy dolls. They need someone to take care of them. They need love.”

And you had so much love to give.

***

Twenty years later you learned the hard way that a shop that fixes dolls doesn’t make any money. You branched into selling high-end, high-quality toys, as well as continuing to collect and fix up vintage dolls. You sewed beautiful new clothes for them and re-glued their hair and re-attached their arms and legs. You carefully removed their eyes and polished them, attached new weights to the eyelids to enable them to open and close, and sometimes heated and re-shaped the eyes in hot water so they would fit properly in their sockets again.

You sold the dolls to any child, or any adult buying for a child, who wanted one and was willing to pay your prices, which weren’t cheap after you’d done so much restoration work. But when the day was over and you’d done the receipts and closed the books and swept the shop and locked up, you took the dolls upstairs to your living space with you, and you played with them, because dolls deserved to be played with.

Men who found out about this hobby of yours found it weird and unpleasant, so none of your relationships lasted more than a few dates. You weren’t close enough to any of your friends for them to find out. You had pen pals, fellow doll aficionados, all over the world, but you wouldn’t admit even to them that you played with your dolls. By this time you had so many that you couldn’t possibly play with them all every night, which was part of the reason you’d been willing to part with some of them back when you’d opened the store. But you did your best to make sure they were going to good homes.

***

Forty years later the internet had nearly destroyed you, and then saved you.

It became so easy to buy vintage dolls, you overbought. You took on employees to help you repair them, but they didn’t love the dolls like you did, so they didn’t stay your employees. Then people stopped buying from the store because it was so easy to get even vintage toys online, at much better prices than you could afford to sell at. You sold through online channels yourself, but it wasn’t enough.

You expanded your offerings to hand-crafted children’s furniture and toys, working with artisans you met at a Renaissance faire or online, reselling their work. And you moved the doll repair business online. It turned out that the number of people willing to send their beloved childhood friend to a total stranger through the mail and pay a lot of money to have her restored was much higher than you’d guessed. You picked up more employees, this time to run the store so that you could work full-time on doll repair.

Fifteen years ago you’d gotten a cat, but she died of old age, and you didn’t replace her. Your doll friends weren’t immortal – you’d had porcelain-headed dolls shatter, you’d had to reluctantly tell heartbroken women that their childhood toy had been mauled too heavily by a dog to be saved – but when age damaged them, it could be fixed. They weren’t doomed to die like living creatures were.

You made sure to make time to play with the dolls every night, no matter how busy you got. Sometimes you hardly had time to do anything but choose a lucky few, dress them in nightgowns and caps for their hair, and take them to bed with you, but you always did at least that.

***

And then there was the day you heard a violent crash downstairs.

You were a woman living alone. You tried not to live in fear, but you knew you were vulnerable. The sound terrified you, so you called the police, and stayed upstairs behind your bolted bedroom door with two or three of your favorite dolls reassuring you, until the cops arrived.

They called you downstairs to see what you knew.

The man had had duct tape on him, and rope, and a knife. You were somewhat shocked that anyone would target _you_ for such a thing, at your age, but the cops tell you that it was probably your age that drew the guy’s attention. He must have assumed you couldn’t defend yourself.

You could not explain why he was lying dead in a giant pile of dolls, his eyes punctured, his throat bruised, his neck broken. You hadn’t left your room. It was more than obvious that a small middle-aged woman couldn’t have done the kind of damage to the dead man that had killed him; the best anyone could guess was that he’d tripped over a rack of dolls and fallen on them so hard that hard plastic hands had jabbed his eyes out and then he’d broken his neck in the fall. But you knew better. The cops couldn’t possibly understand, but you did.

“Thank you,” you said to all the dolls, the creepy dolls you hadn’t yet repaired and the ones that you _had_ and yet children still called them creepy, the pretty vintage dolls and the modern dolls that had needed repair. “Thank you,” you said, weeping over the body of a porcelain doll that had broken, but she was the only casualty. Others had damaged hands and some had crushed plastic bodies and quite a lot of them had their clothes ruined by blood, but those were all things you could repair. “Thank you all so much. You saved me.”

“You’re our mother,” one of the dolls said.

“You saved me,” another doll, a repaired doll, said.

“We love you. We’ll never let anyone hurt you.”

You gathered your precious, precious dolls to you and hugged them, and cried. Oh, your dollies, all your beautiful dollies. You’d saved their lives, and now they had returned the favor.


End file.
